How Najib nearly sold out Malaysia to China

The latest six charges laid against Najib and his trusty lieutenant, Treasury secretary-general Irwan Serigar Abdullah, confirm again how blatantly the previous prime minister and his government were prepared to lie in the face of evidence leaked by brave insiders to Sarawak Report.

They also lay bare the outrageous extent to which this former prime minister was willing to rob his country, laying it open to economic imperialism by its neighboring super-power, which was naturally quite happy to suck Malaysia into a vortex of debt that would have destroyed the nation's independence.

Way back in 2016 Sarawak Report published the secret agreement that lay behind the sudden inflation of the budget for the East Coast Rail Link to double the original proposed cost of $30 billion.

The secret deal with China's state owned CCCC (China Communications Construction Company) laid out in clear detail (including amounts and dates) how the  repayments on the debts owed by 1MDB were to be concealed through those inflated figures.

Najib Razak has given six reasons in refuting a news report that  claimed Beijing offered to help bail out 1MDB in exchange for lucrative stakes in railway and pipeline projects, according to agencies.
The former prime minister was referring to a report by the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) which said Chinese officials had tried to persuade countries to drop their investigations into the troubled state firm.

It said the US$16 billion (RM65.8 billion) East Coast Rail Link (ECRL) and US$2.5 billion Trans Sabah Gas Pipeline were meant to appear market-driven in nature, following revelations of billions being siphoned from 1MDB. This is despite their true aim to "shore up Najib Razak's government, settle the 1MDB debts and deepen Chinese influence in Malaysia", the paper, which broke the 1MDB story back in July 2015, reported.

Najib and his ministers, including then Public Works Minister, Sarawak's Fadillah Yusof, (brother to Bustari Yusof a key collaborator of Najib and major recipient of money diverted from 1MDB) at the time claimed the story was nonsense.

However, within just a few weeks Najib had visited China and signed off on exactly the contract terms that had been leaked to Sarawak Report for the now massively expensive rail project that experts predicted could never be made profitable for Malaysia.

And this week, following the new charges, the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission (MACC) has made clear that the money to fund 1MDB's loan repayments was being funnelled through the project just as had been detailed in Sarawak Report. Inflated pipe line projects in East Malaysia were being employed for the same reason.

Further tranches of cash were also purloined using an inflated and unnecessary land purchase by Bank Negara (no wonder the long standing deputy resigned) and, perhaps even more disgracefully, a straight theft of money from BRIM, the payments supposed to alleviate the lives of the poor.