The Malaysian Insight

SOMETIMES, all you need to do is read the signs.

You don’t need anything in black and white or messages conveyed through the grapevine.

Sportsmen ‎call time when their legs go. Politicians call time when their voters tell them to go. And those appointed to corporate boards and plum positions depart the scene quietly when their patrons are shown the door.

So, the best advice for Petronas chairman Sidek Hassan is to ‎read the signs. 

He has yet to tender his resignation from the national petroleum company for reasons best known to himself. Perhaps, he is waiting for a nudge from Prime Minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad or Finance Minister Lim Guan Eng.

Perhaps he even believes that he does not fall into the category of heads of government agencies who crossed the governance red line by campaigning for Najib Razak and Barisan Nasional. 

‎The former chief secretary should disabuse himself of any such notion. He is in a category of disrepute all by himself. 

There are many senior civil servants and corporate bosses who slavishly served Najib without even stopping to ask if what they were doing was proper.

And there is ‎Sidek Hassan.

In the eyes of the Pakatan Harapan government, he was a key player in a sham of a royal commission of inquiry convened with the sole purpose of scoring political points and hurting Dr Mahathir’s image.

The forex scandal at Bank Negara happened decades ago and despite years of repeated calls from the opposition to uncover what really happened, there was no response from BN until 2017.

Najib needed to kill off Dr Mahathir who had become a thorn in his side. He needed to hurt the opposition leader, who had chiselled away at his reputation by training his guns on the 1MDB scandal.

So, Najib and his operatives convened an RCI on the forex losses and worked out the script of the inquiry even before it began.

The outcome was that Dr Mahathir would be blamed for the billions in losses. Once the script was decided on, the Najib team put in place a team to carry out the hatchet job.

They needed a respectable name to head the RCI and cover the stench of the sham it was.

The offer was made to Sidek and he agreed.

So, the former head of the civil service became a willing player and collaborator in this stitch-up.

He could have said no. Or he could have ensured that the best principles of criminal law underpinned the inquiry proceedings. Sidek did neither.

Instead, the inquiry became a place where there was no place for concepts of beyond reasonable doubt, corroboration of evidence of presumption of innocence.

At the conclusion of the show inquiry, criminal offences were laid at the feet of Mahathir and Anwar Ibrahim, who was the finance minister when some of the forex losses were incurred.

Since capturing Putrajaya, the Pakatan Harapan government  has made it clear that all political appointees to government agencies will have to resign. The Mahathir administration also does not want to deal with anyone who compromised principles of integrity and governance during the Najib years.

Can’t understand what Sidek Hassan is waiting for. – June 20, 2018.