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Sakmongkol ak 47

ariff.sabri@gmail.com

Tuesday 12 August 2008

Costly UMNO campaign costs

I read that the UMNO treasurer, the man with a Chartered secretary degree, is going to court. He is setting aside the judgement of the court ordering UMNO to pay RM 218 million. Wow- that much money eh?

4 years ago, there was this company which supplied elections paraphernalia to UMNO. These include flags, posters, banners, t-shirts, hats, umbrellas, cloth, small and big flags. Most of these were manufactured in Thailand and China where the costs are a fraction of the selling price. Maybe the supplier chalked a 60% profit margin. They made a profit anywhere from RM100-130 million. Cor Blimey!

Doesn’t matter who received it. The practice is UMNO receives all the paraphernalia. Then it distributes them among the candidates. The other parties, sometimes produced their own campaign material. Some less handsome faces want their posters to be in colour. It makes them more palatable to the voters.

When I read what the UMNO treasurer is doing- I said, man this guy is befudging. Why are you hiding behind the verbal semantics? It’s not UMNO who buys bought the material. It was Barisan Nasional? Oh- the service was sent to the wrong person. It should have been sent to Barisan Nasional.

Why all these charade lah? Come on- we in UMNO know who buys them. It is some people in the UMNO headquarters. Maybe the supplier had to grease certain palms first to secure the contract.

Will the elections commission now go after UMNO now that something like this has been exposed. The reply filed by Azim Zabidi did not contest the sum. So therefore the amount must be right.

Doesn’t the EC has regulations on the amount that is spendable by candidates? Assuming the RM 218 million was the only amount allowed, then it is easy to calculate how much one candidate spent. With 222 parliamentary seats and 570 state seats, there were 792 candidates in total. Assuming that each person is allocated the same amount worth, then each candidate spent about RM275,000.

Again- wow!

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