Kit Siang: ‘All Tuns’ dragnet must include Najib, Hisham

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Lim asked if Dr Mahathir’s challenge will find support among those who would be audited. — File pic

KUALA LUMPUR, March 1 — Lim Kit Siang said today Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad’s proposed audit of “all Tuns” and their children must include Datuk Seri Najib Razak and Datuk Seri Hishammuddin Hussein, sons of Tun Abdul Razak Hussein and Tun Hussein Onn respectively.

The former prime minister said yesterday he would accept an audit on his administration after Lim claimed taxpayers lost RM100 billion in financial scandals during his 22-year tenure, but said “all Tuns must be audited. The sons and grandsons of Tuns as well,” in an apparent reference to his successor, Tun Abdullah Ahmad Badawi.

Lim immediately responded by calling for a royal commission of inquiry (RCI) to look into Dr Mahathir’s finance minister Tun Daim Zainuddin’s role in allegedly losing billions of ringgit in public funds.

The DAP parliamentary leader pointed out today that sons of Tuns would include Prime Minister Najib and his Home Minister Hishammuddin.

“Is Mahathir so confident that... other ‘Tuns and their sons and grandsons’ would never agree to any full investigation, even to clear their names?

“Let the prime minister, Datuk Seri Najib Razak and the home minister, Datuk Seri Hishammuddin Hussein, the leading scions of the second and third prime ministers respectively, speak up,” the Ipoh Timor MP said in a press statement.

He also called for Tuns from Dr Mahathir’s era, including Abdullah, Daim, former deputy prime minister Tun Musa Hitam, former MCA president Tun Ling Liong Sik and former Gerakan president Tun Lim Keng Yaik to say if they would support an audit into the alleged RM100 billion “blackhole.”

In recent weeks, Dr Mahathir’s policies have been the subject of scrutiny, after the Najib administration decided to settle out-of-court the RM589 million debt owed by former Malaysia Airline System Bhd (MAS) chief Tan Sri Tajudin Ramli.

The settlement sum was undisclosed, prompting intense public criticism and attacks from the opposition over the right of taxpayers to know how much public funds had been recovered.

Tajudin, 65, had served as the airline’s executive chairman from 1994 to 2001 and was a poster boy of former Daim’s now-discredited policy of nurturing a class of Malay corporate captains on government largesse during the Mahathir administration.

“Malaysians today are still paying for those financial scandals, none of which has ever been fully accounted for,” Lim added today, citing the Danaharta-Tajudin case.

He also said he found it “more productive to focus on Mahathir’s tongue-in-cheek statement” regarding the audit rather than the latter’s challenge for PAS to appoint the DAP veteran as its president after a senior lawmaker said the Islamic party was ready for non-Muslim leaders.

Info : News