The Trial of our Finance Minister.

Picture  this. The finance Minister comes before parliament and makes a pious presentation on the 2016 budget proposal. He actually pontificates. He does this with a poker face. He appeals to the Maker of the seven heavens and seven earths. He refers to holy verses. He makes reference to wasathiyah and maqasid shariyah.

He does this while carrying inside him, the burden of huge falsehoods.Now, that's beguiling.

He knew what Jho Low was up to. He went along and abetted the chinaman. 1MDB was a huge scam to milk as much money as possible. It’s an UMNO culture and its president is the chief proponent.

Nobody else knew what was going on with 1MDB. No one in the cabinet were told. 1MDB then imploded as its financial mischiefs surfaced.

Police reports were made by the crusading Khairudin Abu Hassan. He is in jail at the moment. I am told he meets up regularly with Anwar Ibrahim. It is an irony. The man who started the downfall of Anwar is now sharing the same premises as him.

Now, I am also told by my sources though I cannot affirm the veracity, that 2 senior members of Najib’s cabinet told Khairudin explicitly never to withdraw his police reports. Both these senior ministers claimed that no one in the cabinet were briefed on 1MDB. Let all hell break loose they say and let Najib fry.

Perhaps the sources were only interested in besmirching the names of Adnan Mansor and Zahid Hamidi.  I am sure they are honourable men.

Perhaps Najib wanted to spare the cabinet from listening the briefing done in English and so thought it wasn’t necessary to brief the cabinet.

When assessing Najib as PM and Finance Minister, I am reminded of the polemical books by Christopher Hitchens; The Trial of Henry Kissinger and No One left to lie to. I recommend people to read these books and many others by the same author. Hitchens died in December 2011.

Because, the titles of the 2 books are a nice fit in the machinations of Najib. We are reading a trial of Najib. How it was he who created this monstrous scam called 1MDB. And he is lying to everyone in Malaysia, there’s no more left. From Kings to commoner, from patricians to plebeians.

I have to break a promise I made to myself. I promised to give myself an extended break. I should have said sine die. But the budget is too enticing. Plus I was there when Najib delivered his budget speech.

Is there actual money in the first place in the Budget? I hear rumours attributed to government ministers telling followers that there is no money. Perhaps, the only ministry to have money and takes precedence over all others is the PMs department. He takes up RM20 billion.

MARA? Education Ministry? No money yet.

This man has destroyed almost all the institutions that support the integrity of this country. The office of the Attorney General, the MACC and Auditor General are all compromised. They have been forced to be pliant. The last remaining bulwark is Bank Negara.

Is Bank Negara managing our financial system well enough? Take for example the various pronouncements made by Bank Negara. Do we actually have USD reserves with which to do mop up operations? I.e. selling the greenback to buy as much Malaysian Ringgit as possible to drive up the value of the Ringgit. All I hear is that we have so much and so much RM equivalent in USD. Why didn’t the governor say, how much USD reserves we actually have.

Why do we find so much amount of Malaysian Ringgit in the market? Who has been flooding the market with Ringgit? It is as though some people in Malaysia are printing the Ringgit, spending them and flooding the market with the ringgit. These people may buy anything with USD. They may even be amassing USD and now that Bank Negara can accept USD, they may want to keep USD accounts with Bank Negara. Whether they can do that directly with Bank Negara, I would not know. .

When I listened to Najib delivering his budget speech- it was full of tumbril remarks, you can’t help to feel utterly disenchanted and can’t wait to kick him out Putrajaya.

Tumbril remarks are those smart ass remarks proffered by the nobility that are likely to incite thoughts of revolution. These are remarks made by the upper crust designed to inflame instantaneous abhorrence and revulsion. Those who hear them cannot wait to kick out the author of those remarks.

Examples. If people don’t like to pay toll rates, use free roads. If people can’t afford to eat meat, eat soybean curd. If people don’t like it here, they can emigrate.

Don’t you feel revolted when Najib advises people to spend judiciously when he and the missus splurged around the world? Don’t you feel the erupting anger when Najib offers pious counsels on how to manage our personal finances, when he hasn’t come clean about the financial wrongdoings under his watch? Don’t you feel utterly impatient to see him get booted out for behaving as though we owe him a living and we can thank our lucky stars that Najib is around?

Nobody dies if he is not around. UMNO will survive him. The people of Pekan will not drop dead.

Najib’s oeuvre is his annual showmanship presenting the budget with all the fanfare of a circus atmosphere.  The budget speech 2016 (not to be confused with the bloody thick anggaran perbelanjaan persekutuan 2016, is full of tumbril remarks.

Some examples. This budget is made in the name of He who has created the 7 heavens and the 7 earths, made in the name of such and such holy verse, made in cognizance of the principle of wasathiyah, always in compliance with maqasid shariyah and so forth.

What is Najib doing? Najib is pontificating. The budget is suspicious- because it was presented in such a magniloquent manner.

The budget is a circus.

First I don’t fully understand the over-excitement about budget 2016 or any budget for that matter. It’s an extended document, presented by the finance minister about how much we collected-.that’s called revenue and how that revenue is to be applied. To do that, the finance minister comes before parliament and asks parliament to approve setting aside a specific sum from the consolidated fund. For 2016, the finance minister asks for RM267 billion.

The key sentence- comes before parliament to seek approval for setting aside some money from the consolidated fund. The money set aside will be used for opex- operating or recurring expenditure and capex- capital expenditure. Operating costs and development costs for managing the country. Najib is a glorified general manager of the country responsible to the board of directors, the MPs who in turn represent the real shareholders of the country- the citizens of this country. 

The technicians can go nibble at the details. They have an important job to do. But let us look at the bigger picture. Let’s look at least 5 budgets before. 5 years is a reasonable time period to expect some changes to have taken place. But not 1 year. What can a year achieve?

Yet Najib speaks of epochal transformation enabled by one year’s budget. Is he a fantasist or what?  One year cannot achieve anything. Not rural transformation. Not agricultural transformation.

They will not happen.

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Beyond Budget 2016: The Cost of the Budget.

There is going to be a lot of money passing through all the regulatory agents for 2016. RM267.224 billion. The ministries are essentially regulatory agents. They regulate the release of money they get. And that’s the worrying part.

Every spending by the government contains within it, the seeds of corruption. Preventing and making noise about it, is part of ensuring good governance.

So what’s the fuss about them being regulatory agents? Many of us fuss about that, because whenever there are regulatory agents, there are possibilities for regulatory or state capture. Those involved in managing the spending can also do things to benefit financially. They become corrupt or are presented with the means and opportunities to profiteer because of the nature of their positions.

I cringe each time the government MPs say the opposition do nothing but complain. They on the other hand deliver development to the people. By inference, because they do that, they can and have the right to benefit.

The simple retort to that is, we can’t do anything other than complain and exercise vigilant guardianship over the spending by the government of public money, is because the money is held by the government. What’s left for us to do other than to make sure public money entrusted in the hands of unscrupulous BN MPs is spent correctly?

Any institution receiving public money and having the power to decide on where and how much to spend is a regulatory agency by nature. A ministry getting money from parliament is a regulatory institution. It can decide where, when, how much and who to spend on.

All RM267.2 billion. And there will supplementary budgets to come.  In the course of 2016, the government will come back to parliament to ask for more money. All the government ministers and backbenchers will once again, as usual, tell all the cock and bull story about the good intentions of the government in wanting to spend on the welfare of the people.

The task of ensuring the money is honestly spent falls on the shoulders of a few institutions. We want to see results commensurate with the amount of money we approved for them.

 The judiciary for instance, will look at adjudicating cases and meting out punishments for wrongdoings. The office of the auditor general and his department comb through the expenditures. Every year they publish thick documents on financial wrongdoings. But the wrongdoings do not seem to be corrected. Profiteering, falsification of pricing, embezzlement, fraud all seemed to be a habit.

The agency directly in charge of ferreting out corruption, SPRM appears to be aggressive only on small fry. The big fishes are getting away.

Since 2013 to 2016, we spent on average or we gave on average the following amount to the various agencies:-

TABLE 1: BUDGET OUTLAYS FOR INTEGRITY-WATCHING AGENCIES- 2013-2016.

In RM million.

Dept/year	2013	2014	2015	2016	Average/year
Judiciary	77.63	79.04	90.00	90.00	84.17
Auditor general  and  department	144.09	154.14	165.92	164.08	157.06
SPRM	231.39	260.94	294.33	251.78	259.6
Attorney Gen	185.57	183.07	202.30	185.43	189.09

SOURCE: ANGGARAN PERBELANJAAN PERSEKUTUAN, PP13-16

Since 2013, we spent RM259.6 million per year on average on SPRM. With that amount we expect, and the public has a right to expect more successful prosecutions of corrupt officials. We must stop the game of passing the buck. The excuse of having no prosecutorial powers by the SPRM cannot be upheld; SPRM has legal talent who can prepare water tight cases even obstinate AG officials cannot reject.

I also think it is time for us to create an independent assessing committee to decide on prosecutable cases.

 The Attorney General’s department spends on average RM189 million per year. With that amount of financial resources which employ the keenest legal brains, we don’t seem to be able to prosecute many wrongdoers. Will anyone believe, there are no corruption in public offices?

Which part of the concept of good governance do people in these agencies don’t understand?

Even with that cynicism, I believe and am sure, there are good people working their butts out in these departments. I can only empathise with them. But the executive led by two-faced Najib makes sure embarrassing findings are mothballed and repressed. Insignificant cases are allowed to pass through so as to give a semblance of good governance and to appease public complains.

Najib the PM has destroyed and emasculated almost all these institutions that support the integrity of our democracy.  How many corrupt people has the judiciary punished? What action has been taken on the reports by the auditor general and his department? How many corrupt people has sprm ferreted out? And how many cases of corruption has the AG’s office prosecuted?

The Budget is founded on costly items. We pay on average RM23.6 billion of interest payments on public i.e. loans taken by the government. Each year, our immigrant workers who seem to be taking over this country, repatriate about RM20 billion in recorded transactions and probably another RM25 billion in unrecorded remittances.

Our ministers say our economic fundamentals are strong, yet our Ringgit has fallen most among Asian currencies. It is as though some people are just printing money and flushing the market with Ringgit. And we don’t have USD to mop up excess Ringgit.

Since 2 weeks ago, we have signed up agreement with the USA that Bank Negara can accept USD deposits. This effectively makes our Bank Negara a branch of the Federal Reserve Bank of USA. We have lost our independence.

Now US officers- all of them, financial regulators, financial experts of all sorts and FBI officers are stationed or can come into Bank Negara and monitor all USD movements. We have become a stooge to the US Federal Reserve and by extension a puppet to Uncle Sam. All because, the great Najib Tun Razak has compromised himself in so many ways.

This man will sell his mother to stay in power. Maybe the price of having Uncle Sam keeping quiet about all his transgressions is becoming a modern slave to the USA.

Yet he comes before parliament and put up a good show; presenting budget 2016 in a magniloquent manner.

Why should Malaysian even believe in this man?

Why should I not believe that Budget 2016, isn’t just a perennial excuse for those who regulate public spending, doing the most heinous of conduct? Profiteering from the budget.  

Even though the 2016 budget is smaller than the 2015 budget, RM267.2 billion is a lot of money. A lot of public money can be stolen in so many ways.

This amount of money will flow through ministries which are controlled by the political masters known as ministers. The money will be administered by the KSUs, TKSU, and secretary of division, directors, and officers.

Who are these people?

They are regulators. When there is a regulator, who makes rules of the game, who can decide on tenders, decide on who wins and who does not. There are plenty possibilities for regulatory or state capture. These are refined words which mean the same thing- corruption. Inside the cost- build-up of budgets, certain amounts of commission and deferred gratifications are made. The pay-outs will be made later.

Who will police this amount of public money? That is the greatest challenge in Malaysia today.

The people salivating at the prospects of millions and billions passing through their ministers are ministers, KSUs, TKSUs, directors and regulatory officers. They see a lot of opportunities to extract money for future use- their future that is.

The budget itself is presented by a person who authorised the fraudulent transfer of first USD700, 000 into Jho Low’s account. The budget was presented by a person who must be party to the creation of the fictitious loan by PSI. The budget is presented by a person who later received donations but which were actually laundered money from 1MDB.

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