French Lawyer Detained And Deported

Hantu Laut

THIS GUY IS WAY OUT OF LINE.DOES INVESTIGATION INCLUDES GIVING TALK TO A FEW HUNDRED PEOPLE IN MALAYSIA.IT STINKS HIGH OF POLITICS.

THE GOVERNMENT WAS RIGHT TO KICK HIM OUT.

Leader of a team investigating kickbacks to Malaysian and French politicians is taken off a plane at KLIA

William Bourdon, the leader of a Paris-based team investigating allegations of massive kickbacks to Malaysian and French officials in the US$1 billion sale of submarines to Malaysia, was taken off a plane Friday at Kuala Lumpur International Airport by Malaysian immigration officials and later ordered out of the country.

Later in the day, Bourdon emailed reporters in Kuala Lumpur to say he was to be put aboard a 11:30 p.m. plane for Paris the same night, cutting short his visit short to the country .

“Everything is okay. I am so sorry to leave my friends; we fly tonight for Paris. Keep in touch, take care and have courage,” the lawyer said in an email to Malaysiakini reporter Susan Loone.

The detention and deportation is a major embarrassment that internationalizes the controversy just at a time when Prime Minister NajibTun Razak has been seeking to repair the country's overseaxs image with visits to European dignitaries including Queen Elizabeth and the Pope.

Malaysia has taken a major battering over the past month, first with a violent crackdown on peaceful marchers seeking to present a petition to the country’s king asking for election reform. In a seeming throwback to the 1980s. After that, censors blacked out details of a report about the march carried in The Economist, hardly a rdical publication. That was followed Thursaday with the results of a royal commission of inquiry that concluded that a young aide to an opposition politician had been hounded so badly during interrogation over office spending that he threw himself out of a window and killed himself.

The detention of a lawyer seeking to ferret out details of a massive huge involving defense procurement certainly isn’t going to help. Bourdon was flying into Kuala Lumpur after speaking to hundreds of people in Penang at a fundraiser to continue the investigation of the submarine transaction. Earlier, in an interview before he left for Kuala Lumpur, Bourdon told Asia Sentinel that French police had made what he called substantial progress in procuring the details of the submarine transaction and that he hoped to have access to them in September.

The allegations of kickbacks have surrounded the sale of the submarines virtually since the transaction was completed in 2002. However, the case, which could have the potential to bring down the Malaysian government, has been kept under wraps by a government apparently anxious to protect the man who engineered the transaction – then-Defense Minister Najib Tun Razak, now Malaysia’s prime minister. The case involves the payment of €114 million in “commissions” to Perimekar Sdn. Bhd., a company wholly owned by Abdul Razak Baginda, then a well-wired security consultant and one of Najib’s best friends. Read more.