KUALA LUMPUR: It was 1982 and the Asian Wall Street Journal had just broken the story that Bumiputra Malaysia Finance (BMF) was bleeding because of bad debts in Hong Kong amounting to millions of ringgit. This was the first time Malaysians came to know of what became known as the BMF scandal.
According to Lim Kit Siang, then the opposition leader, everything was kept under wraps with the then finance minister Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah invoking the Central Bank Ordinance 1958 and the Banking Act 1973 to bar anyone from disclosing any affairs of any bank except by way of a court order.
The Official Secrets Act was also amended further to stop anyone from probing the scandal.
But Lim would not accept the government’s secretive attitude and demanded in Parliament to know the losses amounting to RM2.5 billion the parent company Bank Bumiputra would have to absorb, according to a newly-published biography, Lim Kit Siang: Malaysian First.
The first volume None But the Bold will be released today. Written by former journalist Kee Thuan Chye, the book chronicles Lim’s political struggles as well as his family life. It will be officially launched on Nov 9.
As the book points out, despite all the obstacles thrown at him by the Barisan Nasional government in power then, Lim bit into the subject like a bulldog and would not let it go.
In the midst of BMF’s financial loss, Jalil Ibrahim, a 34-year-old Malaysian auditor, was sent to Hong Kong to investigate its accounts. Six months later, he was found murdered. This led to the arrest of a Malaysian man who was charged and convicted for the murder.
His death sentence was eventually commuted to life imprisonment, but he was allegedly linked to Malaysians who had close ties with the bank’s top executives.
Lim piled pressure on the government to disclose what was happening with BMF. He reminded Dr Mahathir Mohamad, then prime minister that the BMF losses would have to be absorbed by Bank Bumiputra, which had been set up in 1965 as part of the New Economic Policy to specifically help the Malays.
In one of his responses, Mahathir declared that those asking for an open inquiry into the scandal were attempting to topple the Malay leaders and destroy Bank Bumiputra. He turned it into a racial issue although it wasn’t one.
Lim replied that if there was anyone doing a disservice to the bank and to the Malays, it was the perpetrators of the heinous crime. Instead of helping the race, these criminals were draining away resources that were originally meant to help the Malays.
After Lim had asked relentlessly for a Royal Commission of Inquiry (RCI) to be set up to investigate the scandal, Mahathir finally agreed to form a three-men committee headed by Auditor-General Ahmad Noordin Zakaria to do the job.
The committee duly completed its report, but the government was still reluctant to make it public. As public pressure mounted against the government’s reluctance, Ahmad Noordin and fellow committee member Chooi Mun Sou stood up to say they would accept the legal implications of making the report public. Only then did Mahathir relent.
The report filled 1,057 pages accompanied by 6,000 pages of exhibits, contained in 13 volumes. A few days after the report came out on Friday, Lim worked feverishly over the weekend to prepare to debate on it in Parliament on Monday.
He digested the massive volumes and wrote his speech for Parliament. When he delivered the three-and-a-half-hour speech in the House, explaining what had happened in the entire scandal and who was responsible for it, the MPs from both sides of the aisle were impressed.
That was one of Lim’s finest hours. Even a few MPs from Barisan Nasional commended him for the quality and diligent research contained in his speech.
Finally, all those who were implicated in the report were charged in Hong Kong and were fined or jailed or both, but the bank never recovered the losses it incurred in what Lim described as the “scandal of scandals.” - FMT
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