The appointment of Muhammad Ibrahim as the new Bank Negara Malaysia governor has once again exposed The Wall Street Journal‘s “lies and total disregard for facts” in its reporting on Malaysia, charged Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak’s press aide.
“WSJ reported as fact multiple times, including by Ken Brown on April 20 and Tom Wright on March 11, that the prime minister appointed Irwan Serigar Abdullah to be the new governor and that he was linked to 1MDB.
“This was despite no announcement having been made, and based on anonymous sources,” added Tengku Sharifuddin Tengku Ahmad in a media statement.
He pointed out that Putrajaya had today named current deputy governor Muhammad Ibrahim as the new governor to replace Zeti Akthar Aziz, who has retired.
Muhmammad Ibrahim would assume his duties starting May 1.
How much immense effort Najib and his PR folk have to put into scoring such trivial points!
There is a reason this appointment was delayed to the 59th minute of the 11th hour in the middle of a major financial crisis, which was that the Agong had signed off the 1MDB Advisory Board member Irwan Serigar Abdullah and was entitled to refuse to change his position.
Once the WSJ had pre-empted the scandalous appointment it took all Najib’s energy to get the nomination changed by a rightly angry Agong – just so he could point-score that the WSJ had been ‘proved wrong’.
Insiders in Putrajaya have been laughing at the matter for weeks and the desperate PM has achieved nothing from the stunt, which like the earlier Saudi minister event, is like tossing pins at a rolling tank of justice that is bearing down upon their heads.