Through its High Commission in Malaysia, Singapore’s corrupted Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong has came out to defend his deals with former Malaysian PM Najib Razak, slamming news reports as “fake news”.
The Singapore official denied that Najib Razak signed two unfair deals – one that gives a heavily-discounted water price 15 times below the rate fellow Malaysian state Melaka is paying, and another one for the Kuala Lumpur-Singapore High Speed Rail project – in exchange for laundering tens of billions in Singapore state banks.
At a media interview by Switzerland’s Attorney General Michael Lauber in July this year, the Swiss AG said that 1MDB funds have been used to bribe both foreign and local officials:
“We think it was a pretext, it was kind of a Ponzi scheme. It was used for bribery of foreign officials, it was used for paying interest, it was used for motivating new officials to run against the legal requirements or it was just simply to reward them.”
This is correct considering that Singapore has been a key beneficiary of Najib Razak’s deliberately-made poor decisions on the water agreement in Jan 2018 and High Speed Rail contract in 2013, when at the same time from 2011 to 2015, tens of billions were swimming and weaving between numerous banks account under eight Singapore banks.
Given Singapore government’s stringent financial controls and reputation as a global financial capital, there only a few reasons how the billions of corrupted money swam around unnoticed. The high chances are the Singapore government knowingly turned a blind eye to the money laundering carried out by Najib Razak.
There are also the numerous similarities between 1MDB and Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund companies. 1MDB was started with Najib Razak being the Chairman, in the exact same manner how Lee Hsien Loong sits himself as the Chairman of Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund company GIC. Lee Hsien Loong corrupts further by making his wife the uncontested permanent CEO of Temasek Holdings.
Like Temasek Holdings and GIC, 1MDB resists public scrutiny into its fund sources despite drawing its funding from the government’s finance ministry.
Every year since 2010, the PM Lee Hsien Loong and Najib Razak goes on a taxpayers-funded holiday retreat, discussing bilateral affairs one-to-one in private without knowledge of their respective Foreign Ministry. The two dictator Prime Ministers would then issue joint-statements, without seeking parliamentary or cabinet approvals.
Lee Hsien Loong, the world’s most expensive Prime Minister is notorious for legal corruptions like passing laws paying million-dollar salaries for himself since he inherited his premiership from his father in 2004. When criticised, the Singapore politician start issuing legal threats and taking people up in courts for libel and defamation lawsuits.