Najib verdict: Is 'national embarrassment' remark justifiable?

MP SPEAKS | All of a sudden, the buzzwords "national embarrassment" have become so popular.

To his discredit, former prime minister Najib Abdul Razak, unfortunately, has to bear with this painful fact for the rest of his life. After all, it is his 1MDB saga that has been contributing to such an undesired tagline.

Najib's legal team, headed by the microphone friendly Muhammad Shafee Abdullah, took offence on such strong words coming from the Court of Appeal.

Shafee was in the view that those remarks were unnecessary and uncalled for.

To begin with, let us closely examine the genesis of such powerful remarks. To be fair to the court, one might ask whether such remarks came out of nowhere.

Having read the summary of the grounds of the written judgement, a fair analysis of it would lead us to this: such remarks are clearly justified and in fact reflecting the ugly picture of the 1MDB fiasco.

If at all we sincerely intend to search for the ownership of the blame, it would definitely fall squarely on none other than Najib's very own legal team.

Najib’s defence

As we are fully aware, one of the defences raised by Najib's legal team is the national interest defence.

This defence was ventilated by the court in its written judgement. It can be gleaned from paragraph 74 to para 77 of the same. In essence, the court outrightly rejected such a flimsy defence.

It is fascinating to note that in offering this defence, Najib was heavily relying on the respective statements by the former attorney-general Apandi Ali, the former MACC chief commissioner Zulkifli Ahmad and the former Treasury secretary-general Mohd Irwan Serigar Abdullah.

All these three witnesses were summoned by Najib as his prime witnesses.

In rejecting the national interest defence, the court rightly concurred with the findings of the trial judge that the testimonies of all those witnesses could not replace the watertight evidence duly adduced by the prosecution.

By virtue of this bewildered defence, Najib sought to contend, inter alia, that if at all there was a mismanagement of the handling of the SRC's fund, it was purely unintentional, wanting of any mala fide on his part and the entire affairs were solely motivated by the national interest consideration. 

Hence, no criminal intent ought to have been associated with such a sacred pursuit.

Whilst Najib's lawyers were perfectly entitled to pursue any possible defence for their client in order to absolve him from those seven charges hanging over his head like a sword of Damocles, they ought to have known, at the same time, the repercussion of it had such a questionable defence been duly dismissed by the court.

In bad light

Needless to say, the 1MDB saga has unnecessarily put Malaysia in a bad light.

One thing Najib should have been fully aware of is that the defence was so fragile, and it was capable of inviting the judges' wrath.

After all, what national interest could be possibly sought for when such purported defence has, in actual fact, created a lot of messes apart from intending to unjustly enrich him and his cohorts.

All in all, in my view, the phrases "national embarrassment", duly coined by the judges, were fair, reasonable and contextual.

Be that as it may, it would not be an exaggeration to say that in employing those buzzwords, the court was trying to drive home this pertinent point - Najib should have been duly embarrassed by what he did to the nation. - Mkini

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MOHAMED HANIPA MAIDIN is Amanah's MP for Sepang and a former deputy minister in the prime minister's department for legal affairs.

The views expressed here are those of the author/contributor and do not necessarily represent the views of MMKtT.