Malaysia’s dirty laundry is piling up

There is a limit to how severe a beating our country’s image can take.

COMMENT

With the recent expose about alleged corruption involving Majilis Amanah Rakyat (Mara) adding to a laundry list of scandals surrounding our public agencies, one has to ask just how shamelessly corrupt Malaysia’s elite can be. We should erect a statue – a set of bronze testicles, perhaps – as a testament to our country’s commitment to pushing the boundaries of corruption.

In its expose, Australian daily The Age detailed the workings of the sale in 2013 of a five-storey apartment block in Melbourne named Dudley House. Implicating Malaysian businessmen as well as senior Mara officers and “greedy” Australian developers, the daily said the amount paid for Dudley House was inflated by A$4.75 million (RM13.8 million) for it to be kicked back as a bribe.

The article notes that Australian deal facilitator Peter Mills was recently quizzed in a civil court case about whether the A$4.75 million was used “to grease palms overseas”, meaning Malaysia. He reportedly answered in the affirmative.

It goes on to note that Mara was “created in 1965 with the noble aim of helping the rural poor” and that its decision to buy Dudley House through a subsidiary, MARA Inc, “shows how far it has strayed from its core values.”

That’s how far our country’s image has gone down the drain. One could comment, of course, that we don’t really have far to fall. Remember, Mara is a government institution and therefore carries the burden of being subject to public scrutiny. This is institutionalized corruption at its worst.

But since the Prime Minister himself has assured us that the matter will be investigated thoroughly, we can only sit back and wait.

We have gone past the point of outrage to being just plain tired of the mess our country is in. We’ve been inundated with countless statements and “revelations” from politicians and watchdogs about 1MDB, all accumulating to form a pile of dirty laundry that stinks to high heaven.

The Prime Minister’s assurance is not very reassuring, since he himself is at the centre of another huge scandal.

If The Age’s allegations are true, which we must hope are not, the Mara scandal is a prime example of just how casually corrupt our elite can be. We have two Datuks caught in the middle of the mess, along with a son of one of them, who The Age alleges helped facilitate the deal.

The exposé claims that according to confidential documents, it was one of the businessmen’s “Porsche-loving son” who facilitated the deal through a network of contacts connected to Mara.

As middle-to-lower-income Malaysians struggle to make ends meet, what with the added weight of the recent Goods and Services Tax, the rich are getting richer through less and less kosher means. Does this blindness to financial ethics automatically come with the territory that wealth affords them?

Our country has to clean up this mess, if not for the sake of ethics, then for fear that nobody is going to want to touch us with a ten-foot pole with all the noise surrounding us lately. Unless, of course, we’re fine with becoming the next Somalia. It doesn’t help either that our country isn’t exactly low on the Corruption Perception Index.

In short, there is a limit to how severe a beating our country’s image can take before our economy collapses along with it. The laundry is piling up, and it can only get so heavy before it destroys the washing machine from its weight and stink.

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