Charles Santiago
Now that former Prime Minister Najib Razak has been found guilty on all 25 charges, the question is no longer whether the system failed, but who actively bent it.
My police report in 2022 against former attorney general Apandi Ali goes to the heart of this reckoning. A High Court judge found Apandi’s testimony wanting: disinterested, internally contradictory and unconvincing.
That judicial finding matters. It strips away the last pretence that decisions made during Apandi’s tenure were merely differences of legal opinion.
If an attorney general lied or misled to shut down investigations and shield a sitting prime minister, that is not discretion but abuse of power.
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But Apandi did not operate in a vacuum. Others amplified and legitimised the fiction of the ‘Saudi donation’.
Current Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission (MACC) chief, Azam Baki, then the director of investigations, confirmed that investigators had met the so-called donor.
The public was told repeatedly and authoritatively that the money was a donation, that it was clean, that the matter was closed.
Those statements now sit uncomfortably beside convictions that establish criminal wrongdoing by Najib, beyond reasonable doubt. The gap between what the public was told and what the courts have proven demands accountability.
Political figures who rallied to Najib’s defence also have questions to answer.
Former minister Khairy Jamaluddin’s assertion that a “political donation” is not a crime helped normalise the extraordinary, dulling public outrage and party scrutiny at a critical moment.
That framing was not neutral; it was political cover. When leaders minimise allegations of corruption at the highest level, they don’t just express an opinion. They shape institutional inertia and public tolerance of impunity.
Then there is the role of ministers who spoke in Parliament. Azalina Othman Said’s 2016 statement that the MACC had confirmed the funds came from the Saudi royal family was presented as fact to the nation’s highest legislative body.
Statements made in Parliament carry constitutional weight. If those assurances were inaccurate or misleading, the course of action cannot stop at the police report I lodged three years ago.
It must include investigations into false statements to Parliament, scrutiny of institutional conduct and, where warranted, prosecutions.
Najib’s conviction closes one chapter. The harder chapter – restoring credibility by holding enablers to account – must now begin.
Charles Santiago is the former MP of Klang.
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