After confirming he has no intention of suing over the latest allegations by the DOJ Najib announced he would be making no more statements on 1MDB at a press conference today, neither will he protest to the US Embassy.
Like any crook in a tight place he has reserved his right to silence and clearly has no intention of taking the likes of Sarawak Report to a civil court for suggesting, for example, that he is a crook and a liar.
Instead, he is leaving it to his Comical Alis to come up with various entertaining defensive arguments for the Malaysian mainstream media to pick up, without daring to report what had been actually said by the DOJ:
Comical Argument 1 – ‘No One Asked For Malaysia’s Cooperation’
This is the claim that it is an ‘outrage’ that the DOJ issued this court seizure ‘without seeking cooperation from the Malaysian Government and 1MDB’.
This line was employed by Najib’s own press operation over the weekend and it was taken up by none other than the Attorney General himself. Today the MIC’s treasurer-general S Vell Paari (whose party received millions of ringgit of 1MDB’s stolen cash in payouts from Najib over the last election) has latched on to it with even greater enthusiasm:
The failure of the US Department of Justice (DOJ) to call up anyone from 1MDB to provide any statements related to the alleged scandals until today proves that it has no case against the strategic development company, said MIC treasurer-general S Vell Paari.
Wow, what brass neck! Anyone who has followed the 1MDB enquiry knows that global investigators and regulators have been exasperated for the past two years by Malaysia’s dogged refusal to cooperate in any investigations since Najib Razak unconstitutionally replaced the original Attorney General with Comical Apandi Ali.
The Swiss AG had gone so far as to specifically complain about this lack of cooperation several times last year and in April this year he again went on the record to confirm that Malaysia has been refusing the very cooperation that these Comical Alis are pretending they were never asked for.
comic value 4/5
Comical Argument 2 – IGP Is ‘Still Investigating 1MDB’
This is the claim that the IGP is still conducting investigations after all. The AG has started implying this over the past month or so, to everyone’s surprise, given that he achieved international headlines with a news conference last year saying that 1MDB had been thoroughly investigated, no wrong-doing had been found and that therefore the entire case was “closed”.
The only task force that did not protest this announcement by the AG was the one headed by the IGP. There has been no formal re-opening of the case and no one assigned to the job, just this new claim that there is some sort of on-going investigation by the upstanding IGP, who is pretending he is going to retire at 60 in September (but who in fact is planning with Najib to extend for another year).
comic value 3/5
Comical Argument 3 – DOJ Case ‘Holds Nothing New’
This argument states that the DOJ case is “re-cycled” and contains nothing new (also contained in Vell Paari’s list of excuses):
Vell Paari also questioned why DOJ only issued an updated version of the same civil lawsuit, which contained largely recycled information, now, almost a year after the original civil lawsuit was filed in July 2016 [malaysiakini]
Nice try, but the 136 pages of the original indictment have not expanded to 251 pages on the basis of thin air. The rest of the world’s media, apart from Malaysia’s, has been dining off the details. Half a billion in further assets have been identified (plus another hundred million from the separate second order issued the previous week) and these have included Jho Low’s super-yacht; $200 million in diamonds bought for ‘Wife of MO1’, Jho Low’s girlfriend Miranda Kerr and his Mum; plus Picassos and other paintings for Leo DiCaprio and other Hollywood pals.
Other brand new payments include bribes paid to PetroSaudi’s Tarek Obaid and to 1MDB’s Casey Tang and Jasmine Loo. Plenty more detail also on how Jho Low money laundered all the dosh and how 1MDB officials forged documents, changed their stories and lied to banks and auditors.
If the likes of Salleh and Vell think there is ‘nothing new’ it must be because either they can’t manage to read 251 pages all in one go or because they are lying.
comic value 4.5/5
Comical Argument 4 – The “Cunning Plot”
The “Cunning Plot” has taken a number of forms between the various utterances of Najib supporters over the past few hours, although ‘The Opposition’, Sarawak Report, civil society NGOs and even Pascal Najadi (son of the murdered former AmBank Chairman) have all been cited as ‘agents’ formenting a ‘plot against Malaysia’ in collaboration with none other than the United States of America.
Blogger RPK described SR as an ‘agent for the CIA’, in “cahoots” with the DOJ, acting as a secret author behind the court document. Communications Minister Salleh Said Keruak has also championed this line saying that the DOJ action was sponsored by traitors from within Malaysia
“The main issue here is not the US or the DoJ but that they are quoting from the complaint that they received. So the issue here is which party is responsible for lodging a complaint with the US DoJ?
And again Vell echoes him today:
He said the latest allegations by DOJ were another political conspiracy of the opposition to topple a democratically-elected government.
“It is no secret that the opposition initiated the investigation by the US DOJ against 1MDB when they sent their henchmen to make a report in the United States. Without this complaint, there would not have been any investigation on 1MDB by the DOJ.
Naturally, Najib’s most enthusiastic (and comical of all) supporter Abdul Rahman Dahlan has also chimed in on this explanation, citing “heinous plotting” by political opponents:
The US Justice Department (DoJ) civil suit against 1Malaysia Development Bhd (1MDB) is “clearly” triggered by complaints by individuals with a “heinous political agenda” against the Prime Minister and the Government.
Barisan Nasional strategic communications director Datuk Seri Abdul Rahman Dahlan said the DoJ should make public the identities of the individuals because Malaysians deserve to know who they are.
“The DoJ should reveal the identities immediately so Malaysians will quickly realise how deeply embedded the complainants are within the opposition parties’ agenda to topple the Prime Minister and the democratically elected Government of Malaysia,” he said in a statement Sunday.
But, why would the United States bother to make themselves pawns of opposition plotters within poxy little Malaysia? None of these ranters attempt to provide an answer to this obvious question. Vell, self-daminingly, does make the point however, that if it had been left to the Malaysian authorities themselves nothing would have ever been reported on these thefts:
“Without this complaint [by alleged opposition plotters], there would not have been any investigation on 1MDB by the DOJ.”
This frankly ludicrous allegation that the Department of Justice of the world’s most powerful nation, an ally of Malaysia, would embark on a ridiculous ‘plot’ inspired by ‘opposition forces’ to make up allegations of billion dollar thefts from its development fund and then slap its top Hollywood actor with an embarrassing sequestration order and start putting the heat on several banks, is nevertheless being worked up to epic proportions.
This from another ally of Najib, who is laughably a former big-wig of Transparency International Abdul Aziz Ibrahim.
“Let us not allow a foreign country overthrow the government of this nation and our prime minister who has been democratically elected. These are all actions without honour and without our patriotic spirit.
“We don’t need a foreign power to interfere in our domestic affairs as we have our own investigators who are credible….. to accuse the prime minister of stealing money is unacceptable,” said Aziz.
On the other hand, it is apparently not unacceptable to this “anti-graft activist” that the Prime Minister has been unable to adequately account for billions of dollars flowing into his accounts, some of which even he has failed to be able to deny came from 1MDB.
comic value 5/5
Comical Argument 5 – There Is “No Proof”
The fifth ridiculous claim by these plainly paid-up supporters of Najib is that “there is no proof” behind the DOJ’s allegations.
No matter that official investigators, banks, major accountancy firms, lawyers and just about every respected world authority have all cooperated to support the DOJ indictment, Malaysia’s Comical Alis are stridently saying there ‘is no proof’ of any wrong-doing at all by 1MDB. This is despite the fact that several court cases have been concluded with bankers in Singapore, who confessed to their collusion and have accepted jail sentences.
These Comical Alis in claiming this nonsense argument are also ignoring the pages and pages of evidence provided by the DOJ, none of which they have refuted with any evidence at all themselves – just weak and unsubstantiated claims about mythical Saudi royal donors.
If Najib was facing trial on this in the United States or anywhere else objective (we can live in hope) his lawyers would be blunt with him. He simply doesn’t have a case: the evidence against him is plainly overwhelming and laid out in black in white already by the civil orders restraining assets. Najib’s lawyers would tell him to cut a deal, so that he might just possibly see some daylight after his inevitable long sentence.
However, even though the fires are burning around their pampered palaces and the smoke is thick in the air, Malaysia’s Comical Alis still say it all ain’t so.
According to Vell, it is because 1MDB have refused to be questioned:
“Even then, until today, nobody from 1MDB has been called up by the DOJ to provide statements, evidence or be questioned. This clearly shows that the DOJ has no case against 1MDB,” Vell Paari said in a statement here today.
Ah! so that’s his ‘proof’. Moreover, in the face of all those pages of documented hard evidence, Vell goes on to claim that there is ‘no documentary evidence’:
“It is truly astounding that the DOJ continues to make so many unproven allegations in its recently updated civil lawsuit against certain assets.
“The DOJ must show documentary evidence to prove the unsubstantiated allegations, otherwise the civil lawsuit can only be deemed a ‘dog and pony show’, purely for geopolitical purposes,” he said
One simply assumes those 251 pages were all too much for Vell to read and understand, whereas the meaning of those million dollar cheques signed over to his party by Najib were nice and short for this Treasurer of the MIC to perfectly comprehend.
comic value 5/5