Crime & Courts

Kit Siang quizzes lack of MACC action on RM9 billion Littoral Combat Ship project scandal

KUALA LUMPUR: The Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission (MACC) has been urged to act on the Parliamentary Public Account Committee's (PAC) report on the Royal Malaysian Navy's (RMN) Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) project worth RM9 billion.

DAP veteran Lim Kit Siang also urged MACC chief commissioner, Tan Sri Azam Baki, to explain to the people what the commission was doing and why it had not acted earlier on the findings by the PAC report.

The Iskandar Puteri member of parliament said former Deputy Defence Minister Liew Chin Tong, back in 2020, had urged the government to investigate the missing RM1 billion linked to the LCS project.

"We did not see any investigation being announced by the government nor any action taken by the MACC since then.

"The PAC report may have given some clue to the MACC about the missing money.

"It is shocking to note that the PAC report revealed not only RM1 billion but RM1.4 billion had disappeared.

"A sum of RM400 million was used by the contractor to pay off its old debt, RM305 million was used to build a centre in Cyberjaya relatively unrelated to the ship-building and RM700 million was classified as cost-overrun by the contractor," he said in statement that was shared on his blog at blog.limkitsiang.com today.

The scandal, he claimed, had also proven Azam wrong as the MACC chief commissioner had earlier dismissed Transparency International (TI)'s annual Corruption Perception Index (CPI) as "mere perception and not facts".

He added that the PAC report showed that "everything is wrong" in the RM9 billion LCS Project – from the appointment of the contractor, the choice of the design of the vessel to how the taxpayers' monies were spent.

Lim also criticised Umno president Datuk Seri Dr Ahmad Zahid Hamidi over the matter.

"Zahid, the defence minister at the time, has chosen to keep quiet in the past 24 hours despite being named in the PAC Report for his decision to choose the Gowind design by the French Naval Group for LCS, against the wishes of the Navy as the end user to have the Sigma design from the Dutch.

"He owes the nation an explanation on why he made such a decision favouring the contractor," he said, adding that the issue involved national security and the Navy personnel were the ones who would go to war using the LCS.

Lim also questioned what drove Zahid to ignore the letters of protest sent by Tan Sri Dr Abdul Aziz, who was then the RMN chief.

"The ball is in the MACC's court now to investigate each and every aspect of the spending and tell the people whether the money was actually siphoned off and who had eventually benefited from it," he said.

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