Youth and Sports Minister Khairy Jamaluddin is urging Putrajaya to deal with the trust deficit and crisis of confidence to stem the free fall of the ringgit. – The Malaysian Insider file pic, August 9, 2015.
Putrajaya needs to immediately deal with its trust deficit and the crisis of confidence it faces to stem the free fall of the ringgit, says Youth and Sports Minister Khairy Jamaluddin.
Khairy said today this lack of confidence and trust in the government also caused investors to take their money out of Malaysia.
His comments came on the back of statements by another minister that sentiments were weighing down the ringgit’s exchange rate to the US dollar despite the economy’s strong fundamentals.
“No one trusts the message or the messenger. This crisis in confidence is why the ringgit is in free fall and investors are taking their money elsewhere.
“The more the ringgit falls, the more expensive things are,” Khairy told a forum at the Malaysian Student Leaders Summit in Kuala Lumpur today.
On Thursday, the ringgit fell to RM3.90 against the US dollar, the first time since the Asian financial crisis in 1998.
Khairy said among the issues that led to this included were the 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB) scandal and the RM2.6 billion in political donations to Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Abdul Razak.
Recent developments in the Najib administration have eroded the public’s trust that it would investigate how 1MDB racked up RM42 billion in debts and whether there was any wrongdoing in the state investor.
A Public Accounts Committee (PAC) probe into 1MDB, which was supposed to haul up the company’s top bosses this month, was crippled after Najib promoted four committee members into his Cabinet on July 28.
The police, meanwhile, have questioned seven officers of the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission (MACC) on claims that information on the agency's probe into a 1MDB-related company was leaked to the public.
The dragnet against MACC investigators has been criticised by civil society groups as a form of intimidation of the anti-graft agency which is investigating SRC International, a former 1MDB subsidiary.
Umno has also been rocked by revelations that Najib received RM2.6 billion in his personal bank accounts from a Middle Eastern donor.
Lawyers argued that the donation had breached anti-graft laws against public servants receiving donations.
“We cannot put off talking about 1MDB and political donations. We have to address these issues once and for all and we have to do it now, not later.”
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