Lepaih tu depa buka kedai,niaga kat pasar,jadi k/tangan Majlis Daerah dsbnya.
Bapak segala bangla masih ada,dok kelupoq nak lepaihkan diri dari kes2 mahkamah...
Nak tau juga atas arahan sapa?...
Roger Ng convicted of bribery,
money laundering charges in 1MDB case...
Former Goldman Sachs banker Roger Ng was convicted by a US jury on Friday of corruption charges related to his role in helping loot hundreds of millions of dollars from Malaysia's 1MDB development fund.
The charges stemmed from one of the biggest financial scandals in history. Prosecutors charged Ng, Goldman's former top investment banker for Malaysia, with conspiring to violate an anti-corruption law and launder money. They said he helped his former boss Tim Leissner embezzle money from the fund, launder the proceeds and bribe officials to win business for Goldman.
Ng, 49, had pleaded not guilty to the charges. His lawyers say Leissner, who pleaded guilty to similar charges in 2018 and agreed to cooperate with prosecutors' investigation, falsely implicated Ng in the hopes of receiving a lenient sentence.
The jury convicted Ng of two counts of conspiracy to violate the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) through bribery and circumvention of Goldman's internal accounting controls, as well as one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering.
"Today's verdict is a victory for not only the rule of law but also for the people of Malaysia," Breon Peace, the US Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, said in a statement. "The defendant and his cronies saw 1MDB not as an entity to do good for the people of Malaysia, but as a piggy bank to enrich themselves."
Ng, wearing a black suit jacket and black tie, showed little emotion as the jury's foreperson read out the verdict. Ng glanced back and forth between the jury and the desk he was seated at. His lawyer, Marc Agnifilo, hung his head after the guilty verdict to the first count was read.
US district judge Margo Brodie, who is overseeing the case, ordered that Ng be subject to a curfew pending sentencing, but said she did not consider him a flight risk. Deliberations began on Tuesday after a nearly two-month trial in Federal Court in Brooklyn.
Agnifilo said Ng may appeal, depending on the outcome of his post-trial motions and his sentence. He stood by his decision to convince Ng to waive extradition to face trial, saying he had a better chance of a fair trial in the United States than in Malaysia. "These big cases are tough and they're hard to win," Agnifilo told reporters.
Prosecutors have said Goldman helped 1MDB raise US$6.5 billion through three bond sales, but that US$4.5 billion was diverted to government officials, bankers and their associates through bribes and kickbacks between 2009 and 2015.
Ng is the first, and likely only, person to face trial in the United States over the scheme. Goldman in 2020 paid a nearly US$3 billion fine and its Malaysian unit agreed to plead guilty.
Jurors heard nine days of testimony from Leissner, who said he sent Ng US$35 million in kickbacks. Leissner said the men agreed to tell banks a "cover story" that the money was from a legitimate business venture between their wives.
Ng's wife, Hwee Bin Lim, later testified for the defence that the business venture was, in fact, legitimate. She said she invested US$6 million in the mid-2000s in a Chinese company owned by the family of Leissner's then-wife, Judy Chan, and that the US$35 million was her return on that investment.
Agnifilo said in his closing argument on Monday that Leissner could not be trusted. Alixandra Smith, a prosecutor, said in her summation that Leissner's testimony was backed up by other evidence.
Jho Low, a Malaysian financier and suspected mastermind of the scheme, was indicted alongside Ng in 2018 but remains at large. - Reuters
Even brother Indonesia looks
down on “Bahasa Melayu”...
Every Malaysian prime minister has his own signature concept or inspiration to build a legacy – or simply a gimmick to fish for votes. Najib Razak had introduced “1Malaysia”, a copy version of the “One Israel”. Claiming the concept was to bring Malaysians of all races to unity, Mr Najib had instead mobilized “Red Shirt” gangsters to terrorize minorities Chinese and Indian, including vernacular schools.
Muhyiddin Yassin’s version was “Kerajaan Prihatin” or a caring government. Yet, his short 17-month legacy will be known by historians as an era of SOP U-turns, policy flip-flops, double standards, incompetence, hypocrisy, corruption, Coronavirus mishandling, economic mismanagement and of course – illegitimacy. At the end, his regime was known as “Kerajaan Gagal” (failed government).
Ismail Sabri is now toying with “Keluarga Malaysia” (Malaysian Family), a slogan towards achieving harmony and prosperity for all people in the nation. Coming from a racist man who supported a thief just because he is a Malay caught stealing a smartphone from a Chinese trader at a shop in Low Yat Plaza, and even had set up “Low Yat 2” specifically for Malay traders, it is indeed laughable.
Unlike Najib, who could leverage on his father – “Razak” – legacy, and Muhyiddin’s “Malay First”, Ismail has no strong identity as a “Malay hero”. The Low Yat 2 business plan to empowering Malay vendors after racial riots at IT Mall Low Yat in 2015 has been a disaster. His advisers soon hatched a brilliant plan – make Bahasa Melayu or Malay language as the second language in Southeast Asia.
Extremely please with the new political product, Prime Minister Ismail Sabri proudly announced two weeks ago (March 23) that his unelected government will discuss with regional leaders to accept his new idea. He argued that only 4 out of 10 ASEAN countries use English in official events at the international level, while the rest 6 countries use their mother tongue.
He claimed that during his visit to Cambodia, he was informed there were 800,000 Malay-Chams who used Malay. In Vietnam, he said there were some 160,000 Malay speakers among those of Malay-Cham ancestry. He concluded that since Malay is also being spoken in Indonesia, Brunei, Singapore, Thailand, Philippines and Cambodia, there is absolutely no reason why Malay cannot become an official language of ASEAN.
In truth, turtle-egg Sabri can’t speak proper English. In fact, he is an accidental prime minister, who happened to be at the right time at the right place. Unlike former prime ministers Mahathir Mohamad and Najib Razak, he is in a lower league. He realized the challenge after one of his ministers tried to skip an international conference due to a poor grasp of English.
After being mocked and ridiculed, Environment and Water Minister Tuan Ibrahim reluctantly flew to Scotland in November last year to deliver his speech at the 26th UN Convention on Climate Change – in Malay language. Using Tuan Ibrahim as an excuse, PM Sabri ordered government officials to only speak Malay or Bahasa Malaysia when representing the country at functions overseas.
Actually, there’s nothing wrong about speaking in one’s mother tongue at an international conference or meeting. Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping deliver their speeches in Russian and Chinese all the time. However, it’s one thing to speak in Malay at official events at the international level. It’s another thing altogether to demand that the language becomes a lingua franca by other countries.
Besides, how could the Malaysian leader convince neighbouring countries to speak the language when his own community – ethnic Malay – prefers English over Malay, or at least mixing both in daily life to show off one’s status? In fact, despite screaming about Malay supremacy, senior ministers of the ruling party UMNO are not proud of their own Malay language.
Rais Yatim, president of Dewan Negara (Upper House), named his four children as Malini Rais, Dino Rais, Danni Rais and Ronni Rais – clearly not Malay names. Nazri Aziz, a former minister who criticised Kuala Lumpur for having too many street names and buildings in English, has not only named his son “Jean Pierre Azize”, but also enrolled the 5-year-old junior in a French school in France.
But Sabri’s political stunt was a non-starter and DOA (dead on arrival) when Indonesia instantly shot it down. Indonesia’s minister of education, culture, research and technology, Nadiem Makarim, has rejected the idea to use Malay language – even between both countries, which supposedly are part of the same Malay Archipelago and share common historical roots, cultural heritage and religion.
Nadiem said the rejection was made known to Ismail Sabri during his brief working visit to Indonesia last Friday (April 1). The clueless Malaysian prime minister might have mistaken it as an April Food joke, but the Indonesian minister has made it clear that it should be Indonesian language – not Malay language – that should be the appropriate choice as the official language of ASEAN.
He lectured that contrary to PM Ismail’s claim, it is Bahasa Indonesia that has become the most widely-spoken language in Southeast Asia. Compared to Sabri’s weak and dubious justification that the Malay language is being spoken in 6 out of 10 ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations), Nadiem claims the Indonesian language extends to 47 countries around the world.
ASEAN Countries...
Adding salt to insult, Indonesia’s National Agency for Language Development and Cultivation chief Prof Endang Aminudin Aziz said the use of Bahasa Malaysia in Indonesia is more of a district language and not used nationally – suggesting that Indonesian language is superior than Malay language. Obviously, it was a slap in the face of PM Ismail Sabri.
In terms of populations, Indonesia has 280 million, while Malaysia has only 32 million. Even then, based on population estimates in 2015, despite being the largest ethnic group in the country, Malays form only 50.8% of Malaysia’s demographics. Not every Malaysian speaks the Malay language, but the same cannot be said about Indonesians.
This is not the first time that Malaysia has proposed using Bahasa Melayu as an official language in ASEAN. Back in 2017, former PM Najib made a similar proposal, but none of the neighbouring countries took it seriously. Every leader knew Sabri’s latest move is another nationalistic drama to score points on the domestic front, the same way Najib did it to deflect his 1MDB scandal.
There’s a reason why Article 34 of the ASEAN Charter states that the working language of ASEAN shall be English, and has remained so since its founding in 1867. It is to prevent any single country from pushing for a specific language as primary or secondary language, which would then attract dispute and competition from another country to do the same – precisely what PM Sabri is doing now.
ASEAN has more important issues to solve, rather than entertaining the Malaysian premier’s personal aspiration or populist endeavour. Issues such as the economic impact of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, South China Sea dispute, Covid-19 pandemic and other bread-and-butter problems are more urgent than Mr Ismail’s silly appetite for playing language politics.
Essentially, if Ismail cannot even convince his own Indonesian brother to support his proposal to elevate Malay language within ASEAN, he should stop dreaming about making it as a lingua franca at the international level. Like it or not, this is a simple economics of supply and demand – the Malay language will automatically become official language when there is sufficient demand for it.
Instead of running around like a headless chicken, he should realize that one cannot force other nations to accept one’s mother tongue as if the world revolves around the Malays. The world has to accept it willingly, just like how Bahasa Melayu became the lingua franca in the Malay Archipelago in the 15th and 16th century, when Malacca was one of the trading centres between west and east.
Traders eagerly and voluntarily learned Malay language, leading to wider acceptance over time, because everyone wanted to trade and profit from the booming economy. The same economic prowess enjoyed by Malacca is the same reason why everyone, including Americans and Europeans, is willing to learn Chinese language today.
As Ismail government tries to shut down vernacular schools, did they know that ever since a Chinese language course started in 2006 in the UAE, the Chinese-language education has seen the number of enrollments increased from merely 20 students to a whopping 45,000 last year? The first Chinese school outside China was opened in Dubai in 2020. There are now 142 schools (Dec 2021) in the UAE offering Chinese language classes.
Likewise, wealthy Chinese readily splash top dollars to send their children in the U.S. and U.K. to master the English language in order to learn science and technology from the Western powers. People are willing to learn a foreign language because there’s something to gain or learn – either economically, technologically or cultural.
Foreigners wanted to learn Chinese because China is the second largest economy so they wanted to either do business or learn its 5,000 years of civilization. Chinese wanted to learn English not only because it could get them jobs in multinational companies or expand their business, but also because English is the language of science, aviation, computers, diplomacy and opportunity.
People also learn German because the language is the gateway to physics, engineering, medicine, chemistry and other world-class education. That’s why American pharmaceutical Pfizer depended on BioNTech, a Germany biotechnology company in the development of Covid-19 vaccines, not to mention why Islamist party PAS leaders love German-made Mercedes Benz so much.
It is the same reason why foreign workers – Bangladeshi, Pakistani, Burmese, and Nepalese – have no problems learning Bahasa Malaysia. Learning the local language is essential to getting jobs here. It’s their economic and survival necessities for them to master the Malay language. Perhaps the Malaysian prime minister has targeted the wrong market, and should approach these countries instead.
Foreign minister Saifuddin Abdullah should not have embarrassed the country by sending an official letter in Malay language to the US Secretary of State Antony Blinken. It was a dumb political stunt as the letter would go straight to the dustbin. This is not a rice cooker which you need a user manual in various languages for customers in different continents or countries.
So, can Ismail Sabri explain why ASEAN, let alone the world, should learn the Malay language? What are the values one can gain by learning Bahasa Melayu? Narrow-minded Malays may not like this, but once you step out of Malaysia, the national language is pretty useless. It’s amusing that unlike Malay and Indonesian languages, the U.S. and U.K. have never fought over which version of their English should be the lingua franca. -FT
cheers.
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