A conspiracy of silence?

• 21 November 2016
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People in Malaysia are hard put to understand why the world’s news media, written and broadcast, have found little or nothing to say about what is, unquestionably, the biggest financial fraud of our times; and perhaps all times. That is, of course, the pillaging of the Malaysian State fund 1MDB and other public monies.

Vested interests, as always, may have been able to hold the dam when the scandal was first broken by the blog, Sarawak Report. The criminal in chief, Malaysia’s Prime Minister Najib Razak, might initially have been able to get away without reacting, and specifically without suing, by claiming a politically motivated attack on his administration.

The world’s major press and news agencies might, similarly, have felt that to print the details exposed them to legal action and, in addition, there will have been pressure by Governments and business interests involved in Malaysian affairs. Packs of highly paid, and greatly over-priced, lawyers will have advised against re-printing the allegations and politicians and businessmen with axes to grind will have deployed all the warnings of which they are capable.

All that should have changed after the US Department of Justice published their expose detailing how and where 1MDB funds had been diverted criminally and by whom. The polite appellation of MO1 did nothing to disguise the plain fact that Prime Minister Najib had stolen vast sums of money from 1MDB and elsewhere. More recently one of his own Ministers publicly admitted that Najib is MO1.

An exhaustive report into the whole affair by Malaysia’s own Auditor General confirmed the facts and scale of these thefts by Najib and his associates and the pathetic attempt to classify that Report as an “official secret” produced nothing but cynical laughter.

So there we have it. Najib is a mega thief and Malaysia a dictatorship of the criminal class, which also includes the Attorney General and the Chief of the Police Force. The national currency, the ringgit, is in free fall and dubious deals with Beijing will not revive it. Last weekend, tens of thousands of Malaysians responded to a call by civil rights organisation Bersih to demonstrate in Kuala Lumpur demanding Najib’s resignation. The reaction? Locking up the Bersih leader in solitary confinement. No bail.

In the face of all that why do the major news organisations (except the Wall Street Journal) continue to remain silent about Najib’s thefts? Unless they can provide credible explanations the public will have to assume complicity. Is that what they want?