Dr Ling says guilty if Dr M says so

Tun Dr Ling Liong Sik declared today that he will be guilty of cheating in the Port Klang Free Zone (PKFZ) scandal if his former boss Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad says so.

Dr Ling, the former transport minister in Dr Mahathir’s Cabinet, said today he was thankful to the former PM for his “generous” offer to testify in his PKFZ cheating trial.

The former MCA president said his ex-boss’s testimony was important because he chaired Cabinet meetings.

“I would like to say thank you very much to him because that is very generous of him because he was chairing the Cabinet meeting and I am being charged for cheating the whole Cabinet so all these witnesses are very important,” he told reporters at the Sessions Court here today.

Dr Mahathir has said that he will testify in the former transport minister’s trial if the court subpoenas him.

The former PM had also pointed out that Dr Ling is innocent until proven guilty.

Dr Ling said that if Dr Mahathir testifies that the Cabinet was cheated, then he would indeed be guilty.

“If they bear witness that they were cheated then I am guilty. If they bear witness that I cheated then there is a case for trial,” he added.

Dr Ling, 67, is charged with cheating the government by misleading the Cabinet helmed by Dr Mahathir on the land acquisition for the PKFZ project.

The PKFZ project was mooted during his term as transport minister and the cost of the project, initially estimated at less than RM2 billion, more than doubled to RM4.6 billion by 2007.

The total bill for the project is expected to swell to as much as RM12.5 billion due to interest costs from deferred payments, if the trans-shipment hub fails to perform.

He faces up to seven years in jail and a fine under the Penal Code, if found guilty.

The friendship between the two doctors dates back to the 1980s when Dr Ling helped hold the ruling Barisan Nasional (BN) together as the MCA president while Dr Mahathir struggled to unite the splintered Umno. Both retired from Cabinet the same year — Dr Ling in May 2003, and Dr Mahathir five months later.

Dr Ling also dismissed speculation that he has been made a scapegoat for the scandal.

“When you are in the palace of justice, don’t talk about scapegoat,” he said.

Last year, The Malaysian Insider reported that Dr Ling had told the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) probing the scandal-ridden PKFZ that it was Dr Mahathir who oversaw the project’s land valuation.

In the verbatim of the PAC meeting procedures, the former MCA president pointed out that the costing and valuation of the land was determined by the Valuation and Property Services Department which was chaired by Dr Mahathir, who was the then finance minister.

“Our job in Ministry of Transport is to only state the fact that we want the land. Costings, valuations and all that, it is not the function of the Ministry of Transport. We do not have a valuation department.

“Costings and valuations is a question for the Treasury to deal with. They have the Valuation Department and everything is there, not in Ministry of Transport. I think [it was] Tun Dr Mahathir who chaired it, and he was the finance minister also. He saw it very clearly. That was the fact of the case,” Dr Ling said in the verbatim report.



comments

In GE10, MCA saved BN/UMNO and Dr. Mahathir, now it going to be Mahathir saving Ling ... payback time. End of the day, it boils down to politics.

What the people of Malaysia wants to know is the truth, and stop of all this 'bad' practises. Let the truth prevails ...

By this, Dr. Ling has finally made it plain to all Malaysians that Mahathir is chief crook, judge and jury in Malaysia. There is, however, no honour among thieves and now that Najib is PM, he will, in turn, readily sacrifice Mahathir in the interest of self-preservation.

That's why Mahathir has been hard at work trying to create chaos and strife in the nation, hoping that that will prevent the emergence of a new government of law and order that will put him behind bars where he, unlike Mandela, will remain for the rest of his life.