Following Lee Hsien Loong’s embarrassing 30-mins meeting with newly-elected Malaysian PM Mahathir Mohamad, the High Speed Rail project along with other bilateral deals with Singapore are now back on the negotiation stage. Sending a message to Lee Hsien Loong, the Malaysia’s Economic Affairs Minister announced an hour after Lee Hsien Loong was sent out the doors of the PM’s Putrajaya building, that all bilateral deals signed by former Malaysia PM Najib Razak has to be re-looked at.
For good reason.
In exchange for hiding his stolen 1MDB funds in Singapore, former Malaysian PM Najib Razak clinched a deal with Lee Hsien Loong to extend Malaysia’s High Speed Rail (HSR) project to Singapore? Entirely plausible.
For a start, Malaysia does not need to extend it’s domestic HSR to Singapore in the first place. There is little economic benefits for Malaysia to link Kuala Lumpur and Johor to Singapore, which has only proven to worsen the rising cost of living of Malaysians. So why is the HSR extended to Singapore then?
Based off United States’s investigation, Singapore played the major role helping Najib Razak hide his stolen billions. The funds transacted through 5 Singapore banks, including Temasek Holdings-owned DBS and Standard Chartered.
The Singapore government only took action when the US Department of Justice filed a complaint and made public their report over the stolen 1MDB funds. Given Singapore’s nanny state nature where even street lamp posts are now put up with surveillance cameras, it is unconvincing to hear Lee Hsien Loong claiming that he is unaware of the inflow of hundreds of millions from Malaysia.
Lee Hsien Loong is a highly-suspicious by Mahathir Mohamad – and rightly so considering the rock solid evidence – in aiding Najib Razak steal and stash billions of Malaysian taxes in Singapore.
Despite being ranked number 1 cleanest country in the perceived corruption index, Singapore is not as clean as Singaporeans and others perceived it to be. The Singapore government’s state-owned company, Keppel, was also similarly flagged and fined by the US government and Brazil government for bribing the officials from the former government of Brazil.
The new Malaysian authority is currently conducting deeper investigations into the 1MDB funds, and chances are Lee Hsien Loong and Singapore will have a lot to answer.
Alex Tan
States Times Review Editor