HANTULAUT: Is The Police Competent In Reading The Law?

HANTULAUT: Is The Police Competent In Reading The Law?: Hantu Laut The NFC debacle, is it morally wrong or criminally wrong? As usual, Malaysian media only give a half full cup for the public to...

Is The Police Competent In Reading The Law?

Hantu Laut

The NFC debacle, is it morally wrong or criminally wrong?

As usual, Malaysian media only give a half full cup for the public to drink.Of course, if you don't ask the right questions you wouldn't get the right answers.

Like the smart reporter asking Wan Azizah whether she has Anwar's Omega watch which Azizah replied in the affirmative and next was her most terrifyingly stupid request "cuba tunjuk".No one in their right sense would think Azizah would be carrying the watch everwhere she goes, only that embarrassingly stupid reporter.

I have in my previous posts explicitly mentioned that Shahrizat should resign her ministerial position out of moral obligations.

Is the police competent in reading the law? Are they under public pressure to indict the directors of NFC or they do have a watertight case aginst them?

What is criminal breach of trust?

Section 405 of the Penal Code (Act 574) stated that:

405.Whoever, being in any manner entrusted with property, or with any dominion over property either solely or jointly with any other person dishonestly misappropriates, or converts to his own use, that property, or dishonestly uses or disposes of that property in violation of any direction of law prescribing the mode in which such trust is to be discharged, or of any legal contract, express or implied, which he has made touching the discharge of such trust, or wilfully suffers any other person so to do, commits “criminal breach of trust”.

The punishments under the law came under Section 406 to 409:

406. Whoever commits criminal breach of trust shall be punished with imprisonment for a term which shall not be less than one year and not more than ten years and with whipping, and shall also be liable to fine.

As always Mat Zain is all pumped up to grind his axe against the AG. He may be wrong here when he asserted Section 409 is the charge applicable to the directors of NFC.Unless, they are considered civil servants or agents the charge should be under Section 406.If the case is thrown out there would be many poison arrows flying toward the AG.

Section 409 below:

409. Whoever, being in any manner entrusted with property, or with any dominion over property, in his capacity of a public servant or an agent, commits criminal breach of trust in respect of that property, shall be punished with imprisonment for a term which shall not be less than two years and not more than twenty years and with whipping, and shall also be liable to fine.

If they are considered as civil servants, which I doubt, or as agents which is possible than Mat Zain may be right in his assumption.

Needless to say, the directors of NFC had strayed away from the main objective of the soft loan given to them.The lack of due diligence by all parties concerned may be the cause of this debacle.In the first place the loan should not have been given to a non-GLC entity.Soft loan of this nature should only be approved to GLCs, where the government has complete control over the company.

Having not seen the terms and conditions of the loan agreement and the books of NFC it would be unwise to speculate.

Only the AG can determine whether there is watertight case against the directors of NFC.

PKR Wants FELDA Settlers To Continue the "katak dibawa tempurong" Syndrome

Hantu Laut

The omnifarousness of Malaysian politics from the disingenuous and empty promise of a Sabah politician who tried to fool the kampong folks promising to get 50% oil royalty for Sabah if his party voted into power, to a politically bankrupt of ideas of a PKR Malay politician who called the proposed listing of FELDA as "an evil scheme"

Obviously, this Malay politician from PKR wanted the future generations of FELDA settlers to continue living "under the tempurong" as Rocky cleverly put it in his article below.

PKR's chief strategist Rafizi Ramli has described the proposed listing of Felda as "an evil scheme". Scary. Since when did an IPO become an evil scheme to cheat the rakyat? Yes, it's scary when young politicians like Rafizi start to label things "evil".

What really is evil in the scheme of things involving Felda and its 113,000 setllers? I'll tell you what, Rafizi: Evil is the scheming going on to stop the IPO and to deny the settlers' children and their children to have a shot at a better life, for them to be able to get out of the little plots that the government opened up years ago so that they could pursue bigger and better opportunities.

Evil is the scheming minds of politicians - young ones like Rafizi and old ones like Tengku Razaleigh - who want settlers to remain as settlers forever, and who expect the settlers' children and grandchildren to continue to become settlers.

Yes, that's evil.

What the IPO offers settlers is not just the windfall in terms of ringgit and sen. It allows these settlers to move up in life and become part of the future growth of Felda in Malaysia and the rest of the world. It allows the settlers to keep what they already have and, in addition, open up vistas for the settlers' future generations to become more than just settlers.

A few years ago, an think-tank conducted a study on more than 20,000 settlers in the state of Sabah. One of the questions they asked the settlers is whether they would like their children to become settlers after them. None of them said they wanted their children to become settlers.Read more.

PKR is the weakest link in the amalgamation of strange bedfellows. They will get the least seats among the three components in the coming general elections.

Singapore's Lee Family and Nepotism

A blogger feels the wrath of the ruling family

Singapore’s ruling Lee family, apparently angered by a comment made on a Singapore-based blog Temasek Review Emeritus, has come down hard, with Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, his wife, Ho Ching, his brother Lee Hsien Yang, all demanding apologies for intimating that they have filled top government positions with family members.

Lee Kuan Yew became prime minister of Singapore in 1959 and ran the place until 1990, when he stepped down to become a senior minister and then was appointed minister mentor by his son, with many of his critics alleging he has continued to run the island republic from behind the scenes. After an interregnum from 1990 to 2004 when Goh Chok Tong held the premiership, Lee Hsien Loong took over as prime minister and has led the People’s Action Party government since.

Among other Lee family members who have held high positions in government are the elder Lee’s daughter, Lee Wee Ling, who is director of the National Neurological Institute. His other son, Lee Hsien Yang, was chief executive officer of Singapore Telecommunications from May 1995 until April 2007. He was appointed the chairman of the Civil Aviation Authority of Singapore in 2009.

Ho Ching, Hsien Loong’s wife, has run Temasek Holdings, the sovereign wealth fund controlled by the Singapore Ministry of Finance, since 2002 after serving as president and chief executive officer of the government-owned Singapore Technologies. Although she has been criticized for some disastrous investments, including one in former Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra’s Shin Corp that Fortune Magazine called a "spectacular misjudgment" as well as several others in flagging western investment banks, she has never been asked to step down.

TR Emeritus, as the blog is known, hastily took down the article, which is no longer available. Apparently written by a contributor or in response to another article, it has been described as pointing out that the elder Lee’s appointing Hsien Loong prime minister and Hsien Loong appointing his wife to head Temasek Holdings “was nothing short of ‘cronyism’ and nepotism.”

The blog has posted a full apology, saying, among other things, that “we recognize that the article meant or was understood to mean that Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong had secured, or was instrumental in securing, the appointment of his wife, Mdm Ho Ching, as the Chief Executive Officer of Temasek Holdings (Private) Limited for nepotistic motives. We admit and acknowledge that this allegation is false and completely without foundation. We unreservedly apologize to Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong for the distress and embarrassment caused to him by this allegation.”

Richard Wan, representing TR Emeritus, was unreachable. He posted a statement on the website saying he would no longer respond to questions from the press. He also asked TRE readers to “refrain from making such comments about Mdm Ho Ching with regard to her appointment in Temasek Holdings (Private) Limited. Any such allegations put up by anyone on TRE will be deleted.”

That may not have been enough. On Feb. 17, the government-controlled New Paper reported the parliament had pushed through an amendment to the Evidence Act that gives the courts the discretion to admit deleted online posts as evidence. The amendment, according to the paper, gives the courts “the discretion to consider relevant evidence by widening the admissibility of several categories. Among them are changes to the computer output evidence - which means computer printouts and sound and video recordings can be treated just like other evidence in Singapore courts.Read more.