By KINIBIZ
It is that time of the year again when the Auditor-General furnishes his audit findings of various ministries, government departments, agencies and more. As usual, the tomes that the AG produced for the Auditor-General Report Series 3 make for good bedtime reading — if you enjoy horror stories, that is.
There was the civil servant who stole RM1 million from government coffers yet walks free to this day. There was the massive, multi-billion ringgit 1BestariNet project that has failed to deliver something as simple as decent Internet connectivity so far. There was the theft of medicine worth more than a million ringgit from Kuala Lumpur Hospital.
The list goes on and on. Credit to the AG, he is getting good at documenting all these discrepancies and issues in the government machinery. But the more pressing question is on follow-up.
What are we doing about these findings? Why do we still have these sort of horror tales year after year after year? It is pointless to highlight these issues if, ultimately, we do nothing about it.
Meantime we also published a number of great news, analyses and comments this week. If you missed a few from gawking at the horrific findings in the AG’s Series 3 report, fret not, we have a shortlist below:
Pick 1 — Mah Sing, from plastics to property. A leading property brand today, Mah Sing Group traces its roots to a humble plastics trading firm set up in 1965. In a three-part issue series, KiniBiz talks to Mah Sing chief Leong Hoy Kum on the company’s journey across two decades, the viability of its business model, Iskandar Malaysia and more. Start reading here.
Pick 2 — Lawyer refutes claim 1MDB guarantee ‘not explicit’. Following an earlier claim by the government that its guarantee of RM10 billion of 1Malaysia Development Bhd (1MDB)’s debts is not explicit, prominent lawyer Tommy Thomas disagrees, saying the letter of support, which is ‘irrevocable’ according to the bond documents, is binding. Read here. For Thomas’ full legal opinion, go here.
Pick 3 — Curbs on household debt working, says Bank Negara. The worrying growth of household debt levels in the country has been slowed down by the macroprudential measures introduced by Bank Negara which are beginning to show results, said its governor Zeti Akhtar Aziz this week. This comes as the economy grew by 5.6% for the third quarter of the year. Read more here.
Pick 4 — Mega scandals: when will we ever learn? Decade after decade, Malaysians have seen mega scandal after mega scandal rock the nation, but we haven’t seem to have learned our lesson, lamented our resident cat. Instead the familiar patterns pop up over and over again. Read more here. To check out our issue series on Malaysia’s mega scandals last week, go here.
Pick 5 — AG can do lots over 1MDB. The Auditor-General this week said that it does not need to audit 1Malaysia Development Bhd (1MDB) as this was already done by a third-party auditor. Fair enough, says our resident cat, but surely the AG can still do something about the findings of the audit, which highlights gross mismanagement at the state investment fund and myriad other issues? Read more here.
Pick 6 — Is YTL running its own agenda at 1Bestari? Set to cost RM4 billion over 15 years, 1BestariNet was to equip our schools with high-speed Internet access and modern computing systems, but only 5% of teachers and 1% of students use it daily. What gives? Our resident cat laments that YTL had been allowed to use this platform to build “the largest and widest 4G network in Malaysia” instead. Read here.
Pick 7 — Too high a cigarette price increase. The cigarrette companies have bumped up their prices again following another excise duty hike. But why have they bumped it up by so much compared to the actual excise duty increase? Our resident cat’s calculations found that the price hike was 250% of the duty hike. Read more here.
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– by Khairie Hisyam Aliman, Assistant News Editor
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