MUHYIDDIN COMES OUT FROM THE SHADOWS: The 'Ides of March' begins

‘DPM is already salivating at the prospect of being the next premier.’

Oh Ya?: The crack has started. How could Deputy Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin make such a statement when the cabinet for which he is a member had absolved 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB) of wrongdoing?

With this open rebellion from his No 2, PM Najib Razak should either resign or sack him, no two ways about it.

Anticonmen: Indicators of fraud (International Standard of Auditing 240):

Management override of controls, unsubstantiated sham transactions, arbitrary debt/equity conversions, non-compliance with financial procedures, non-existent or fictitious assets used as collateral for financial arrangements, low operational revenue that does not justify high borrowings, overinflated value of assets, inability to repay loans, transferring of funds to shady investment havens and offshore bank accounts, inordinate delay in presenting accounts, related party transactions, exorbitant fees paid to consultants, exorbitant interest rates paid to lenders, shadow directors giving instructions and exercising de facto control, fictitious accounting using journals not supported, unreconciled bank reconciliations, high turnover of senior staff and/or directors, poor keeping of records and documents, poor internal controls, poor accounting system, absence of internal audit, and no calling of tenders for contracts.

Vijay47: Anticonmen, thank you for the list of ‘Indicators of Fraud’. My work at times requires me to delve into corporate activities and accounts (I am not a chartered accountant) and your indicators are an extremely useful guide.

Incidentally, almost everything you mentioned would be relevant to 1MDB and nearly every GLC (government-link company).

I think Muhyiddin is being unduly worried over 1MDB. It does not matter that "1MDB involves complex corporate transactions to do with national and government interests".

We do not need to look far for "support in terms of expertise" when the cabinet is teeming with such experts who after one brief briefing were able to establish that everything in the doomed company is okay and ‘I'm alright, Jack’.

Further, it was exceeding kind of the DPM to instruct the 1MDB management "to take all allegations including those on social media seriously". No wonder Malaysiakini is leading in the ‘Most Popular Portal’ race.

Capo: The DPM is already salivating at the prospect of being the next premier.

CHKS: If there's a lesser of the two evils, we choose the lesser one; if there are two equal evils, how do we choose?

KJ warns of systemic failure if 1MDB goes sour

Commentable: Minister Khairy Jamuluddin, stop skirting around the issues that are causing the "black hole" in the first place. There is a lot of ‘ifs’ in what you said:

1) if 1MDB’s fundamentals are “good enough”;

2) if 1MDB management can make quick business decisions to monetise the money to fulfill their debt obligations;

3) if anything goes wrong, one can still strip sale the company to recover its debts;

4) if the value of its assets exceed its debt obligations;

5) if despite those assets, there is enough cash flow to service its debts;

6) if assuming it has enough money to service its debts, it has even more cash to start getting their projects off the ground quickly;

7) if 1MDB survived all these, let's not forget then if the IPO (initial public offering) of its power asset Edra Energy and the “parcelling out” of land assets in central Kuala Lumpur scored major success; and

8) if the MOF (Ministry of Finance), local banks and tycoon Ananda Krishnan have more money to spare to fill in the void.

If you are right, technically we don't have a problem then.

NewMalaysia: Any person with basic financial knowledge would have suspected something is wrong in 1MDB.

A company with a mere RM1 million capital could easily buy a few pieces of prime land worth billions at an undervalued price and got to borrow billions without any prior track record in any business venture.

Yet the company has been incurring huge expenditure every year without generating any source of material income or business, then got the few pieces of prime land re-evaluate, increasing their market price so as to allow it to borrow more cash every year to cover its exorbitant expenses and operation cost.

Furthermore, it is planning to venture into energy business and township development without any prior experience and expertise.

With the current market, 1MDB will find it very difficult to continue to re-evaluate its lands to a higher price in order for it to continue to borrowing to cover its expenditure.

Sabahan: Yes, Khairy has omitted to say that the main assets were land obtained very cheaply from the government (read: belonging to the rakyat). Take that out and you will have a bankrupt company with billions of debts.

Paul Warren: From just reading the headlines, I conclude that what Khairy is really saying is, even if it is dead, don't buy the coffin yet and don't bury it. Keep everyone in mourning until they too die one by one out of hunger. - M'kini