PAS members paying for suit against Sarawak Report editor

PAS deputy president Tuan Ibrahim Tuan Man denies Umno is bearing the costs of Hadi Awang’s defamation suit against Clare Rewcastle Brown in the UK.

AMPANG: PAS today denied that Umno is covering the legal costs of its president Abdul Hadi Awang’s civil suit against Sarawak Report editor Clare Rewcastle Brown in London.

Its deputy president Tuan Ibrahim Tuan Man said the party’s members had paid for the costs through contributions made during fund-raising programmes that PAS has held.

“We declared in our programmes that each PAS member must mandatorily contribute RM5 towards the funds for the suit,” he said at a press conference here today.

Rewcastle Brown had reportedly questioned how PAS could afford its lawyers in the UK, where defamation suits are costly.

She had said such suits could cost RM600,000 and asked who was paying the lawyers from the legal firm of Carter-Ruck.

“I think she doesn’t need to worry about where we are getting our funds from. It is certainly not coming from Umno,” Tuan Ibrahim said.

He said the money was obtained from PAS members who felt responsible for and sentimental about the party.

He also claimed that they were angry at the alleged slander made against PAS.

The suit, filed on April 21 at the London High Court, is in relation to an article Rewcastle Brown wrote in August 2016, and published in the Sarawak Report, in which she claimed RM90 million was “reckoned” to have entered the accounts of top PAS leaders to woo them into supporting Umno and Barisan Nasional.

Meanwhile, former PAS Youth chief Nik Mohamad Abduh Nik Aziz called on Rewcastle Brown to explain where she was obtaining her own funds for the case.

“We want to ask Sarawak Report where they are getting their money from,” he said. - FMT