Will DPM resign if his stand on 1MDB is ignored?

Kit Siang also wonders about the position of the Cabinet members on 1MDB , whether they are only willing to take a personal view like Muhyiddin and not an official one.

KUALA LUMPUR: DAP elder statesman Lim Kit Siang, taking his cue from a speech which Deputy Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin made at an Umno gathering , wants to know whether he would propose the sacking of Najib Abdul Razak if the Prime Minister was responsible for all the major decisions taken by the 1MDB board in the RM42 billion scandal.

The whole situation was getting to be very farcical, warns Lim, if not for the brutal reality that it involves RM42 billion of taxpayers’ money.

He wonders about the position of the Cabinet members on 1MDB , whether they are only willing to take a personal view like Muhyiddin and not an official one.

He was commenting on the 1MDB scandal and Muhyiddin stealing the thunder from the 11th Malaysia Plan and Najib respectively after a video recording of the Deputy Prime Minister’s speech last Saturday went viral.

“Muhyiddin can be heard in the video, calling for the sacking of the 1MDB Board and the police to come in,” noted Lim who is also DAP Parliamentary Leader and Gelang Patah MP. “The video was also circulated among MPs in Parliament on Thursday while Najib was presenting the 11th Malaysia Plan.”

Lim added that after Najib’s presentation of the 11MP, Muhyiddin stood by his speech calling for the 1MDB Board to be sacked for the RM42 billion debt scandal “or it will bring down the Barisan Nasional (BN) government”.

In the recording, said Lim, Muhyiddin said this was his advice to the Prime Minister. “He added that he was not against Najib’s leadership.”

Lim recalled what Muhyiddin said in the recording:

“The entire 1MDB board should be sacked and the police should be called in to investigate their involvement in the scandal.”

“I told the PM, sack the 1MDB Board. If I owned the company, and the CEO racked up so much of debt, that I had to pay interest between RM100 and RM200 million every month, what else to do? Just sack.”

Muhyiddin, said Lim, felt that sacking the 1MDB Board would send a clear signal that Putrajaya viewed the issue seriously. “During his press conference at Parliament House after Najib’s presentation of the 11MP, Muhyiddin said he had made the same suggestion before in public.”

The Deputy Prime Minister insisted that the opinion was a personal one, continued Lim, “and he has yet to receive any response from the Prime Minister on the matter.”

Lim argued that this was a most extraordinary situation.

“The Deputy Prime Minister insists that he wants the 1MDB Board to be sacked and investigated by the police, as there was no time to wait either for the Auditor-General or the Parliamentary Public Accounts Committee,” said Lim. “But it’s only his personal view in the face of the biggest financial scandal in the nation’s history.”

Lim has questions: Did Muhyiddin make clear his position on the 1MDB Board in Cabinet that heads must roll?; When will he make a decision to resign from the Cabinet and as Deputy Prime Minister if the 1MDB Board was not sacked and the police called in to investigate the scandal?

Furthermore, he reiterated, Muhyiddin should propose the sacking of Najib as Prime Minister if he was responsible for all the major decisions taken by the 1MDB Board.