KUALA LUMPUR: Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad plans to file an application for judicial review to block the circulation of the Royal Commission of Inquiry (RCI) report into Bank Negara Malaysia's (BNM) foreign exchange (forex) losses in the 1990s.
Dr Mahathir’s lawyer Haniff Khatri Abdulla said the RCI secretariat would be given seven days to respond to his client’s demands, among them is that the commission stops distributing the report.
“We intend to write to the secretariat for the RCI on Monday (Dec 4) to demand them to stop circulating or publishing the current report until they have inserted all 495 pages of Dr Mahathir’s materials in the report,” he said in a statement on Friday.
“We shall give them until Friday, Dec 8, to forward a positive response. Failing which, we shall put in a judicial review application to prohibit the publication of the ‘half-cooked’ report,” he added.
The report had among others stated that the finance minister had “deliberately concealed the facts and information and made misleading statements to the Cabinet”.
The finance minister at the time was Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim while the then prime minister was Dr Mahathir.
The RCI also implicated Tan Sri Nor Mohamed Yakcop, who was in charge of BNM’s forex dealing operations at the time.
The losses incurred by the central bank’s forex dealings between 1992 and 1994 were found to have amounted to RM31.5bil.