AG’s report will whitewash 1MDB, says Raub MP

Ariff Sabri suspects Najib is trying to buy time with his directive to the Attorney-General.

PETALING JAYA: Raub MP Ariff Sabri has expressed doubts that the Auditor-General’s investigation of 1MDB accounts will yield anything dramatic although he hopes for a “vigorous and thorough” job from the AG.

In a recent blog posting, Ariff says he suspects that Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak gave his directive for the audit as a ruse to show that 1MDB is transparent and clean.

He says Najib may also be trying to buy time, hoping that public interest in the issue will have waned when the AG finally comes up with his report.

“I am not excited about Najib asking the Auditor-General to examine and report on the accounts of 1MDB,” he says, noting that there are thousands of documents, including e-mails, to go through and that crucial data may have been destroyed.

“So the AG will have a tough time,” he writes.

“We want the AG to examine, report and determine who to blame if any wrongdoing has been committed. But readers have to forgive me if I think the investigation will come to nothing. First it will take a long time, one year at least for the AG to come up with the right forensic team, and if his outfit has none, he will have to outsource it. Then he will probably report to a committee and then only the Public Accounts Committee, whose chairman has been quite vocal, will get its hands on it.”

“This is a just a ruse for Najib to project that 1MDB has a semblance of transparency and has been fraudless in its dealings.”

He speculates that it will be two to three years before “everything is ready”, by which time, he says, “the public, much to the delight of the actors behind the 1MDB fiasco, will have forgotten the severity of the issue.”

“Najib would have bought himself 2-3 years of extra time to sweet-talk the people into believing that the 1MDB issue is just an evil plot by the opposition, especially the DAP, of course, led by that brain-box Tony Pua.”

He says Najib’s lawsuit against Pua will also go through a time-consuming process. “It will probably take ages before the courts can decide. By that time, the current parliament will expire and probably a new PM will surface. The public will wait with bated breath to see the presence of Jho Low, Riza Aziz, Paris Hilton, Stephanie Tiffany Heah and many others in and out of court.”

He congratulates Najib’s advisers for coming up with the idea of suing Pua. “If 1MDB goes before the court, then no one can speak about the matter because it’s sub judice. Wah, this time Najib’s advisers have got it right.”

In the end, he says, 1MDB will be whitewashed, with the AG’s report finding nothing incriminating. “The report will say the board misled the chairman. Chairman Tan Sri Lodin in turn misled the chairman of the advisory board, the Finance Minister. The Finance Minister forgot to inform the PM. So the PM technically does not know anything very much in the same way he is uninformed about what is going on the country. We can’t fault him for not knowing can we? That would be unreasonable.”

“So a better way, I think, is to form a parliamentary select committee and call up all those involved in 1MDB. After that, recommend the course of action.”