Too late to save 1MDB, says Ariff Sabri

'Why wasn't the Auditor-General alerted before the debts had approached RM50 billion?'

PETALING JAYA: Prime Minister Najib’s directive to the Auditor-General to investigate 1MDB’s accounts has come too late, says Raub MP Ariff Sabri in his latest blog entry.

“The milk has been spilt,” he writes. “Why wasn’t the Auditor-General alerted before the debts had come to nearly RM50 billion?”

He notes that there have been reports that 1MDB will be wound up. “Oh, my God! For six years we’ve been told that everything was safe and fine. And now, suddenly, there’ll be a winding up?”

But Ariff says he figures it’ll take months before the Auditor-General can complete his task because of the mountains of documents involved. “What’s worse, much computer data have been destroyed.”

He notes that another Umno leader has alleged that there’s a political conspiracy behind the attacks on 1MDB and he dicloses that the allegation came even as he was writing his article.

“If it were true that there’s a political agenda, it would be justifiable because the objective would be to expose a government that has made it possible for abuse and corruption to happen, in fact given a licence for them to happen.”

“In all these six years, it’s not public funds that the government has been protecting, but thieves and robbers.”

If there are conspirators, he says, then the most prominent of them would be Mahathir Mohamad. “Is there an NGO that would like to lodge a police report against the former prime minister?”

He says politicians who continuously question 1MDB’s integrity have a right to do so because the government’s guarantees for the company “exposes the nation to a huge financial debacle”.

“Don’t expect silence and the closing of an eye. It’s a heavier wrong to conceal a swindle and a theft. We’ve all heard that in order for a transgression to occur, it takes silence on the part of those who know about it.”

As for Najib’s directive to the Auditor-General, he says, the public is bound to ask, “Is this a quick 11th hour attempt to conceal a financial scandal whose stink has now blown to every corner of the world?”