31 August 2022

Crocodile tears of hypocrites...

Najib praised Independent Judiciary in 2015,
but condemned unfair Judiciary in 2022...

UMNO president Ahmad Zahid Hamidi on Saturday (Aug 27) claimed that Najib Razak, his former boss, is a victim of political persecution, and has never asked for his charges to be dropped. In front of hundreds of the party leaders and members gathered for a special briefing at its headquarters, Mr Zahid said they must call for a royal pardon for Mr Najib.
 
The president of the United Malays National Organization (UMNO) also tried to use the jailing of Najib to push for an immediate general election. Najib’s children – Mohd Nizar and Nooryana Najwa – were also present at the chest-thumping session, where they shamelessly praised their crooked daddy, along with Najib’s infamous wife, Rosmah Mansor – known as Imelda Marcos of Malaysia.
 
Shafee Abdullah and Zaid Ibrahim, two lawyers who represented Najib at the trial of SRC International – but lost spectacularly – also took to the stage at the grand UMNO meeting hall and repeated some of the boring arguments they had used in the Federal Court to defend the former disgraced prime minister. The mass party meeting was nothing but a gathering of the crooks.

Zahid, who is facing 47 charges related to corruption, money laundering and criminal breach of trust (CBT), had watched with his own eyes how merciless Chief Justice Tengku Maimun Tuan Mat – the first woman Chief Justice – slaughtered crooks who tried to waste judicial resources. He knew it’s a matter of time before he joins “Bossku” Najib as the Kajang Prison Complex’s newest inmate.

Rosmah, 70-year-old wife Najib, is expected to be convicted too when the High Court delivers its decision on the coming September 1. While her case is not as explosive as her 69-year-old husband’s, there are sufficient evidences to convict her in the corruption trial linked to the RM1.25 billion Sarawak rural schools’ solar energy project and people will once again celebrate and rejoice.

Nooryana Najwa Najib and Rosmah Mansor

Nooryana, who appears to have perfected her acting skills inherited from Drama King Najib, should win the Academy Awards in milking sympathy from hardcore supporters. Her drama included sharing some sob family stories, reading a letter from Najib behind bars (claiming again that he was not given a fair trial) and crying that his 70-year-old daddy should not be spending time in jail.

She has every reason to defend her father. After all, besides stealing people’s money to accommodate her wife’s lavish lifestyle (including a 22-carat pink diamond necklace worth US$23 million or RM100 million using money siphoned from 1MDB funds), Najib had also used dirty money to host her daughter Nooryana’s lavish wedding in 2015, where flowers alone cost RM3 million.
 
Both overrated UMNO lawyers, Shafee and Zaid, were giving excuses to justify why they had lost. In 2018, Shafee arrogantly said – “We’ll have fun and the prosecution will have nightmares”. The jailing of Najib proves that the so-called UMNO hotshot legal eagles could only win their arguments in a corrupted Kangaroo Court previously, when a single-party-dominant regime UMNO controlled the judiciary system.
 
While Nooryana wins the Oscars award for the best actress, Zahid was the clear winner for best actor. For an UMNO thug like him, it’s terribly hard to shed tears. But Zahid “Komedi” did it flawlessly. With voice choked with emotion, the UMNO president said – “My heart breaks when I look at the crowd and the person who was always with us is not here today”.

Exactly how did Ahmad Zahid Hamidi do it like one of the best K-Drama actors? Easy – he just needed to imagine how Tengku Maimun rejects all his attempts to delay the final appeal and sends him to the prison. However, unlike Najib, Malaysia’s first political blue blood to be imprisoned, the 69-year-old Java-immigrant Zahid will not get any royal pardon if convicted.
 
Zahid Hamidi

If the above mass gathering drama looks and sounds familiar, that’s because Zahid and the Najib family of crooks were taking a page from Anwar Ibrahim. In April 1999, tens of thousands of protesters took to the streets after the former prime minister was convicted and sentenced to 6 years in jail for corruption, triggering violent street protests that raged for four days.
 
It was a second round of massive protest after Anwar led tens of thousands of supporters in September 1998 to protest against then-PM Mahathir, who sacked his deputy over dubious charges of sodomy. Malaysian police, armed with bamboo sticks, and riot police with shields and batons as well as plainclothes police with sticks, along with water cannon trucks, were deployed to contain the protests.

In August 2000, Anwar was convicted of sodomy and sentenced to 9 years in prison. In April 2001, the Court of Appeal upheld his corruption conviction and effectively lost his final appeal in the Federal Court in July 2002. The Court of Appeal upheld his sodomy conviction in April 2003, but stunningly freed him after the Federal Court acquitted him of sodomy in September 2004.
 
In April 2008, about 20,000 people gathered to welcome Anwar’s return to politics after his 5-year ban expired as a result of his conviction for corruption in 2002. But in June 2008, Mohd Saiful Bukhari Azlan met then-Deputy Prime Minister Najib Razak at his residence to complain that he had been sodomized by Anwar Ibrahim. He was arrested and charged in the same year.
 
Najib became the 6th Prime Minister in March 2009. In January 2012, the High Court acquitted Anwar in the Sodomy II case, only to be overturned by the Court of Appeal in March 2014 and upheld by the Federal Court February 2015. Anwar was convicted largely because Najib felt threatened after Opposition Pakatan Harapan captured 52% of the popular vote in the May 2013 General Election.

Najib Razak Behind Bars 

As much as Zahid and Najib families wanted to copy Anwar’s “Reformasi” movement, they can’t. As a start, Najib was convicted and sent to prison under his own UMNO government. The fact that the UMNO meeting was held in the comfortable air-conditioned hall, unlike tens of thousands of people who suffered police brutality in defending Anwar, shows which group has the genuine commitment.
 
Aside from shedding crocodile tears, the clueless and panicked Zahid had falsely claimed that Commonwealth nations will see Najib’s trial as unfair. In truth, not a single country was sorry about the former prime minister. When he was charged in 2018, hundreds of journalists – both domestic and foreign – broadcasted the biggest money heist of the century.
 
His ultimate final appeal this week, some 4 years since his trial of stealing RM42 million of public funds began, again saw global news media covering the story. However, there was neither a single country, nor news media that had expressed concern over the unfairness in Najib’s trial. On the contrary, foreign countries applauded how the top court created history by sending the first premier to jail.

In comparison, when Anwar lost his final appeal in 2015 under Najib administration, the United States Embassy in Kuala Lumpur issued a statement – “The decision to prosecute Mr. Anwar, and his trial, have raised serious concerns regarding the rule of law and the independence of the courts”. But the U.S. was not the only country that had followed closely the trial of Anwar.
 
Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, European Union, High Commission of Canada in Malaysia, Australia Foreign Ministry, British government and UN High Commissioner for Human Rights were some of foreign nations or observers who had questioned about judicial independence and had expressed deep concerns over the politically motivated proceedings under the abusive and archaic law.
 
Najib’s 1MDB scandal involved global investigation across three continents, where money was spent on high-end property, luxury goods and lavish holidays and parties involving Najib, his family and partner Jho Low. The U.S.-DOJ investigation results say that over US$4.5 billion was misappropriated from the 1MDB fund, with some of the money used to buy the private jet, a super yacht, Picasso paintings, jewellery and real estate.

Najib Razak, Rosmah Mansor and Riza Aziz

Like it or not, there is no country that sees Najib’s trial as unfair. In fact, former U.S. attorney-general Jeff Sessions described the multi-billion dollar corruption scandal involving former PM Najib as the worst form of kleptocracy. Only UMNO sees the crook as a victim. Even then – birds of the same feather flock together – only Zahid faction in the party is defending Najib.
 
Worse, UMNO primary vote bank – ethnic Malays – was celebrating the jailing of Najib, whose “Malu apa bossku” (What’s the shame, my boss?) moniker was turned into jokes. Taking to social media, they said the ex-premier should not be ashamed of serving the jail sentence and stop being a hypocrite for condemning the same justice system which he had praised before.
 
In 2015, when the United Nations (UN) Working Group on Arbitrary Detention said Anwar Ibrahim was illegally jailed, the office of Prime Minister Najib Razak defended the judicial system, saying the verdict to jail opposition leader Anwar was reached by the courts “after exhaustive and comprehensive legal process had been followed over many years”.

Najib said – “The Federal Court judges will have upheld the Court of Appeal’s guilty verdict only after considering all the evidence. Malaysia has an independent judiciary – with many rulings going against senior government figures – and the government does not have the power or authority to overrule the decisions of the courts. Anwar was convicted of a crime, and this was a criminal, not a political case.”

Perhaps Najib and his family should blame karma or divine retribution. What Najib did to Anwar and his family in 2008 has now come back to haunt him and his family – “Don’t do unto others what you don’t want done unto you”. But in this case, it wasn’t Anwar who sent him to prison. Najib simply had run out of luck. You do the crime, you do the time. - FT
 




cheers.

27 August 2022

Karma is the answer...


Back to 2018 when Najib was on the way out after BN's defeat to PH — a woman’s Facebook post went viral (below).So why did this one woman’s thoughts have so many people interested? Maybe because the woman in question was Azrene Ahmad, daughter of Rosmah Mansor, Najib Razak’s wife, and someone who is not shedding any tears about seeing her family voted out of office.

Azrene is Rosmah’s daughter from her first marriage, though very little is known about that time in the former first lady’s life. She also has one brother from that union, Riza Aziz aka the guy who produced The Wolf of Wall Street with ill-gotten 1MDB gains.

Interestingly, she alleges that Najib was initially unaware of the “malignant” forces at work in 1MDB. However, when he was made aware, he did nothing to stop it, and instead the whole family got in on the action.

Billions went missing, and Azrene writes that they were not just used to fake a fancy Hollywood movie and buy shiny things with – the funds were used to bribe, extort, silence, maim and even kill individuals that crossed the family’s path.

This is some heavy, heavy stuff. From a layman’s perspective, many of the things she brings up have been offered up for public scrutiny, and consistently met with steadfast denials by the former PM. The giant yacht? Nope – that baby was bought with lunch money. Millions in personal accounts? Super generous gift. Billions gone out the fund? Bad business deal – sorry about that!

She finishes her lengthy statement by reminding both her estranged mother, step-father and blood siblings (Riza Aziz) of what she told them before cutting ties: That one day the people would rise, and their crimes would be exposed. That they would reap what they have sown (it seems to be a field of sh*t, if Azrene is even half-accurate), and not a penny less. - coconuts kl








Forward to August 2022, these were Azrin's parting words...



Finally,on August 23,2022 the Federal Court dismissed his final appeal against his corruption conviction linked to a former unit of scandal-tainted state fund 1MDB. Najib in 2020 was sentenced to 12 years’ jail and fined 210 million ringgit, after the High Court found him guilty of seven counts of corruption and abuse of power linked to some 42 million ringgit that flowed from SRC International, a former 1MDB subsidiary, to his personal accounts. He was sent to Kajang prison to serve his term...


cheers.

25 August 2022

Prison is no bed of roses...

 
Disgraced former prime minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak will apparently be accorded “better” treatment during his incarceration, according to Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim, based on information the opposition leader has gathered from prisons personnel.

However, the PKR president, who had himself collectively served around 10 years in prison under separate sentences, emphasised that time spent behind bars is not a bed of roses.This is particularly so for someone like Najib who is accustomed to living a lavish lifestyle, he added.

In an interview with US business news channel CNBC, Anwar reflected on his time in prison, which he claimed was tougher than what Najib will supposedly go through. 

However, the Port Dickson MP said his own time in prison had allowed him to reflect on the future and made him spiritually and mentally stronger, while most of his time was spent meditating, reading and exercising. 

“I was in prison during the Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad era. It really was much tougher. I had no access to books, or family (visits) initially,” he said. 

“Even under Najib’s government, I was thrown into a normal lock-up, sleeping for weeks on the floor, without consideration for my back problem or my age. 


“From what I understand from my old colleagues, prison officers, I think Najib will be given somewhat better treatment, in the sense that he will be accorded some facilities.  

“But still, prison is not a bed of roses. It is tough. Particularly (when) compared to his present lifestyle of a seven-star hotel, (he) is going to experience something really difficult.” 

Najib was ordered to serve his 12-year jail sentence beginning yesterday after the Federal Court upheld the high court’s conviction of the Pekan MP for all seven of his charges related to the SRC International Sdn Bhd corruption case.

Earlier today, the Prisons Department had refuted a claim made by a social media user that Najib will be given special treatment at Kajang Prison, where he will spend his jail term. Labelling the accusation as fake information, the department rubbished any notions of Najib being accorded access to better food, beds, or even an air-conditioned cell. 


On a separate matter, Anwar said Malaysians still have a duty to perform in the coming 15th general election. He reminded voters that if they are determined to ensure the country is safe from corrupt leaders, they must take a position to choose those they believe are incorruptible. 

He also credited the public for making a change during the last general election in 2018 when Najib’s government was voted out. He said Najib would have still been a free man if he had remained in power. 

“Without that decision (in 2018), this wouldn’t have happened. Political leaders, political elites will continue to rob without impunity. They are invincible and above the law,” Anwar said. – The Vibes

Antara dua darjat...

cheers.

24 August 2022

Cash is no King and Justice done...

 
Sapa check-in Kajang Inn...

Malaysia’s Najib Razak on Tuesday earned the dubious distinction of being the nation’s first former prime minister to be jailed, after the Federal Court dismissed his final appeal against his corruption conviction linked to a former unit of scandal-tainted state fund 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB).

The ruling is a landmark moment in the years-long effort by anti-corruption activists to bring to justice those responsible for the plunder of 1MDB, which was founded and controlled by Najib during his tenure as prime minister from 2009 to 2018.

Chief Justice Tengku Maimun Tuan Mat said Najib’s lawyers had failed to prove that the findings of the lower courts were incorrect, nor were they “perverse or plainly wrong so as to warrant appellate intervention”.

“These appeals are therefore unanimously dismissed and the conviction and sentence are affirmed,” Tengku Maimun said when reading out the judgment on behalf of a five-judge panel.

We salute you for upholding the law...

Najib in 2020 was sentenced to 12 years’ jail and fined 210 million ringgit (US$46.8 million), after the High Court found him guilty of seven counts of corruption and abuse of power linked to some 42 million ringgit that flowed from SRC International, a former 1MDB subsidiary, to his personal accounts.

The former leader’s failure to overturn this conviction also means he is disqualified from holding office as MP for Pekan in his home state of Pahang, and barred from contesting in an election.

Najib, who remained stoic as Tuesday’s judgment was read, was immediately surrounded by family members after the judges left the court. His wife Rosmah Mansor, as well as daughter Nooryana and sons Ashman and Nizar, were present in court.


Rosmah is scheduled to hear the verdict of her own corruption trial on September 1, linked to a 1.25-billion-ringgit solar energy project for rural schools in the state of Sarawak in Malaysian Borneo.

Najib was transported to Kajang Prison – located 30km from Kuala Lumpur – in a police motorcade about an hour after the court delivered its ruling.

He faces four other cases linking him to the plundering of 1MDB, and has pleaded not guilty to all charges. - scmp

Thank you sir...




cheers.