Tun Dr Ling, who was transport minister from 1986 to 2003, was acquitted by the High Court here this morning of cheating charges over a land purchase for the PKFZ project.
He was charged in 2010 with deceiving the Cabinet into approving the land purchase for the PKFZ project, despite knowing that the approval would result in wrongful losses for the government.
Tun Dr Ling also faced two alternative charges of deceiving the Cabinet into believing that the land purchase’s terms — at RM25 psf plus 7.5 per cent interest — had the acknowledgment and agreement of the Land Valuation and Property Services Department (JPPH) despite knowing that there was no such agreement.
The High Court judge would have little choice but to acquit the former Transport Minister because the onus on the Attorney General to prove the case beyond reasonable doubt was almost impossible. Not only did the Attorney General chambers picked the charges which were the hardest to prove, they also failed to conduct their investigations in a competent manner, intentionally or otherwise.
How is it that the Attorney General could charge Tun Dr Ling of “deceiving the Cabinet” with the prime witness of the case, the former Prime Minister, Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamed claimed that he was never cheated or lied to? That single testimony by the former premier would have single-handedly destroy the prosecution’s case.
Of course the fact that 4 other cabinet ministers Tan Sri Dr Fong Chan Onn, Tan Sri Abdul Kadir Sheikh Fadzir, Datuk Seri Mohamed Nazri Aziz and Datuk Seri Mohd Effendi Norwawi, witnesses for the defence and the prosecution supported Tun Dr Mahathir’s position completely wiped out any chance of a conviction.
Did the Attorney General office not know of Tun Dr Mahathir’s and his cabinet members’ position? The Attorney General must either be incompetent, or especially clever in framing a charge knowing that it would never stand up to scrutiny.
The PKFZ project, which was proposed by Dr Ling in 1997, had an initial cost of RM1.1 billion that then ballooned to over RM4.6 billion in 2007. The project is expected to exceed RM12.5 billion in cost based on calculations by Pricewaterhouse Coopers who conducted a special audit of the project in 2009.
This is the second failure to secure conviction of a major criminal case by the Attorney General this year. Earlier, the elite Special Action Unit officers, Azilah Hadri and Sirul Azhar Umar, or the then Deputy Prime Minister Dato’ Seri Najib Razak’s bodyguards were also controversially acquitted of murdering Mongolian Altantuya Shaariibuu. The criticism then was similarly placed on the incompetence of the prosecutor, intentionally or otherwise in failing to summon key material witnesses.
Malaysians today cannot be blamed for their distrust of the government and becoming even more cynical that the “big fishes” with strong ties with the ruling Barisan Nasional elite will never receive the justice they deserve. And until such big fishes are caught and punished by the Najib administration, all the bells and whistles attached to the “reform” programmes such as the “war against corruption” will just be mere rhetoric without action.