Lim Kit Siang is “shocked” that the Council of Eminent Persons (CEP), formed under the Pakatan Harapan government, never produced a report.
He was responding to former CEP member Jomo Kwame Sundaram’s revelation that a secretariat under former finance minister Daim Zainuddin, and not the council, had produced a report.
The DAP veteran called for the CEP secretariat’s report and the findings of the Institutional Reform Committee (IRC) to be tabled as a White Paper before Parliament adjourned on April 4.
He also wanted an explanation from Daim and asked if the latter “agreed that the report of the CEP secretariat and IRC should be made public”.
“I had all along been under the impression that the CEP, which, besides Jomo and Daim, had former Bank Negara governor Zeti Akhtar Aziz, former Petronas president and chief executive officer Hassan Marican and corporate tycoon Robert Kuok, as members, had produced a report.
“When Dr Mahathir Mohamad was prime minister a second time, I had urged him to make the CEP report public,” he added in a statement.
Lim also recalled that Daim had called on the government to make the CEP’s recommendations available to the public.
He added that the former finance minister and close associate of Mahathir had also stated that the CEP interviewed more than 300 individuals, including bankers, businesspersons, civil servants, civil society members and union officials and that those interviewed had revealed a culture of turning a blind eye towards corruption.
In March 2019, Mahathir appealed for more time before revealing the contents of the report, which was classified under the Official Secrets Act (OSA), because it concerned matters still being negotiated.
“I don’t know what we have not revealed, when we reveal everything, but there are some things that are still in negotiations.
"We cannot reveal what we are negotiating until a decision is made," he had said.
Following this, PKR president Anwar Ibrahim had asked all parties to give Mahathir space to resolve some of the recommendations.
He said although, in principle, Harapan wanted the CEP report to be published, there were some recommendations which could be implemented that needed to be identified so that they could be explained to the people.
However, the Harapan government collapsed in February 2020.
The members of the IRC included former Bar Council president Ambiga Sreenevasan, retired Court of Appeal judges KC Vohrah and Mah Weng Kwai, National Patriots Association president Mohamed Arshad Raji, and constitutional law expert Shad Saleem Faruqi. - Mkini
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