26 Apr 2024, 08:43 Kuching
26 Apr 2024, 01:43 London
“This weekend, my former boss Clare Rewcastle-Brown did interviews with foreign media about Malaysia. Some think it’s strange that a British woman keeps talking about Malaysia, but I was not surprised,” Lester Melanyi (pic) said in a statement on Monday.
Melanyi claimed that Sarawak Report founder and editor Rewcastle-Brown received funding from “very powerful people in Malaysia”.“If Clare is such a believer in transparency, she should provide the Sarawak Report accounts and show us where her funding comes from. But she can’t do this. Because if she did, we would find out who her real boss is.
“I am a small man and don’t want to be attacked myself, so I won’t say who (the founder is).
“Documents were fabricated and doctored for money. It is disgusting, but what is more disgusting is those people who get foreigners to do their dirty work. In some countries, it would be treason,” he said.
Melanyi, a former Sarawak Tribune senior journalist, claimed to have previously worked for Sarawak Report.
In an attack against his purported former employer, Melanyi alleged that Opposition leaders had conspired with the website on the 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB) issue.
He claimed that almost 90% of the content in a Sarawak Report article on 1MDB had been tampered with.
Lester also claimed to having met Swiss national Xavier Andre Justo, a former executive of PetroSaudi International, who allegedly handed over 10% of the documents related to 1MDB to Rewcastle-Brown.
Sarawak Report released a statement to The Sun, who asked for comment on Lester’s latest lies. This was our statement:
“I can confirm that I am not being paid by anyone in Malaysia.
Radio Free Sarawak is largely funded by a reputable European foundation which focuses on rainforest issues and I sustain my web hosting costs for both sites from that source.
We also receive a steady and very welcome stream of mainly small donations from people who support our work through our site’s donation page – and those dozens of small donations add up very helpfully to cover some of the expenses we have incurred, mainly as a result of legal and hacking attacks.
We publish our accounts in the normal way and these are available at Companies House.
For the past year, I have received a salary for my work at RFS and SR, which has fallen below the level of taxable income in the UK. Prior to that I worked on the project entirely unpaid for over four years.
As for the rest – I do not have a boss and I do not fabricate any documents. Lester has not provided a single shred of evidence to back his nonsense claims compared to the detailed researched that I have undertaken for years on the problems besetting Malaysia.”
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