Highway to hell

— Lucius Goon
The Malaysian Insider
Feb 21, 2012

FEB 21 — The thing that troubled me most about the latest expose in Malaysia is the seemingly cozy relationship between the current Umno lawyer and the former chief justice, who incidentally is a former Umno lawyer.

I am beyond griping that the contract was not awarded through an open tender because open tender means competition and competition means level playing field — all the things that our friends like Ibrahim Ali, Mahathir Mohamad don’t like.

But it does disturb me that there appears to be a business nexus between an Umno lawyer Hafirizam Harun and Tun Zaki Azmi. In most developed countries, judges and especially chief justices keep an arms length from lawyers because they don’t want to be accused of bias or bringing the judiciary into disrepute. The more strict judges do not even socialise with lawyers.

So I can’t imagine the head of the Supreme Court of the USA or India or even the Chief Justice of Singapore getting a government contract or being involved in a business with a lawyer, especially one who acts for the government.

It just does not appear proper and throws up all kinds of permutations, not the least of which is the blurring of lines between the independence of the judiciary and the government.

If today there is a bunch of conspiracy theories on the Perak outcome and any other decisions which went the way of the government while Zaki was the CJ, the Najib administration have only themselves to blame.

Even by the recent bungling standards of the administration, this was a bad, bad one.

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15 Replies to “Highway to hell”

  1. ///In most developed countries, judges and especially chief justices keep an arms length from lawyers because they don’t want to be accused of bias or bringing the judiciary into disrepute.///

    The question of bringing the judiciary into disrepute does not arise in Bolihland because from the outset the public has already lost faith in our judiciary.

  2. Pakatan simply has to reach out to the rakyat to say that they will review all IPP and tollroad contracts once they roll into Putrajaya.

    There is much anger on the ground against piratisation projects like these. No transparency, no attempt to even use nominees, simply a blatant “so what” to the rakyat.

  3. Wait till you hear of the RM200 million of grants for acquaculture awarded to UMNO cronies when Moo was Agri minister. All the projects failed and now Noh Omar has to either clean up the sh!t or attempt to sweep it under the carpet.

  4. Pakatan Rakyat should try and reach out into the Malay heartland and let the rural folks realize the root cause of Malaysia’s backwardness.Everyone regardless of race must explain and talk to everybody else about corruption,abuse of power and other wrongdoings that have robbed and plundered the nation for 54 years.

  5. This is how BN manage to keep so many YESmen in the civil servant sectors, cabinet ministers,police and judges etc etc by either granting them after their retirement big fat contracts or/cum directorships in some government controlled GLCs enjoying bit fat remuneration. It has been going on for years and years?
    These contracts all come with variance clauses which means the actually completion cost usually sky rocket way beyond the contract sum. Its milking the nation dry.

  6. Now Hafarizam says that they won the tollroad “based on merit”. What nonsense. Show us the “merit”. Never built or operate highways before. The “merit” he is referring to is that of being UMNO lawyers.

  7. Malaysian lawyers are the best in Malaysia you know…

    Shahrizat gets 250 million cow rearing project…

    Zaki and co get 2.2. billion highway contract…

    Daim got of course almost all the contracts….

    If you have got a kid …a lawyer he must be….

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