UK lawyer refutes AGC’s claim on identities of Sulu sultan’s heirs

 

Malaysia stopped paying the sultan of Sulu’s heirs their annual compensation after the 2013 Lahad Datu incursion. (Reuters pic)

PETALING JAYA: A London-based lawyer representing the Sultan of Sulu’s descendants has refuted the claim by the Attorney-General’s Chambers (AGC) that the heirs’ identities are doubtful.

Citing a 2019 letter from former attorney-general Tommy Thomas to fellow lawyer Paul Cohen, Elisabeth Mason said Thomas’ correspondence showed that the AGC and the foreign ministry had known and formally recognised the claimants and their rights “for years”, and had been directly and individually involved with them for just as long.

“Last week’s statement from the current attorney-general that their ‘identities are doubtful’ is deeply misleading to his audiences,” Mason told FMT.

“The Malaysian government knows the claimants well, knows that they peacefully engage with Malaysia, and that they are totally distinct from the pretenders who have violently confronted Malaysian sovereignty.”

The AGC was responding to reports that the government had been instructed by a French arbitration court to pay at least RM62.59 billion (US$14.92 billion) to the descendants of the last Sulu sultan.

The arbitrator, Gonzalo Stampa, ruled on Feb 28 that Malaysia violated the 1878 agreement between the old Sulu kingdom in the Philippines and a representative of the British North Borneo Company that used to administer what is now Sabah.

In explaining why there was no representative sent to the arbitration proceedings in Spain, the AGC last week said the 1878 agreements “contains no arbitration agreement”, and that Putrajaya did not recognise the claim by the heirs of the Sulu sultanate.

“We further stress that the identities of the heirs are doubtful and have yet to be verified,” it said.

However, in the 2019 letter which Mason cited, Thomas acknowledged that the claimants were the rightful heirs to the sultanate, and that they were the same people who Malaysia had been making payments to for years.

The letter, which FMT has sighted, was also copied to Stampa.

The dispute has its origin in the 1878 Deed of Cession between the then Sultan of Sulu, Sultan Jamal al Alam, and Baron de Overbeck, the then maharaja of Sabah, and British North Borneo Company’s Alfred Dent.

Under the agreement, Jamal ceded sovereignty over large parts of Sabah to Dent and Overbeck, who agreed that they, and their future heirs, were to pay the heirs of the sultan 5,000 Mexican dollars annually.

In 1936, the last formally recognised Sultan of Sulu, Jamalul Kiram II, died without heirs, and payments temporarily ceased until North Borneo High Court chief justice Charles F Macaskie named nine court-appointed heirs in 1939.

Although Malaysia took over these payments when it became the successor of the agreement following Sabah’s independence and the formation of Malaysia in 1963, these payments – equivalent to RM5,300 – ceased in 2013 after the Lahad Datu incursion.

In the 2019 letter, Thomas attached a true copy of the Macaskie judgment of 1939 and said Malaysia did not dispute the identity of the individuals and their right to be paid.

He also regretted that payments ceased in 2013, adding that Malaysia is “now ready and willing” to pay Cohen’s clients all arrears from 2013 to 2019.

FMT has also sighted a document from the Malaysian embassy in Manila dated June 28, 2012, requesting the heirs, whose names were listed individually, to collect their cheques for “cession money”. - FMT