KUALA LUMPUR: Pakatan Rakyat said there had been leakage in the payment of the 1Malaysia People’s Aid group takaful insurance or i-BR1M. It said Putrajaya had paid out RM350 million to insurance companies but only RM42 million has been claimed.

Pandan MP Rafizi Ramli said this huge payment had only profited the insurance companies. “With claims of only RM42 million, Putrajaya is paying more than RM300 million in clean profit to these insurance companies,” he said at the Parliament lobby yesterday.

Under the i-BR1M scheme, RM50 goes to i-BR1M insurance which provides protection of up to RM30,000 in the event of death or permanent disability.

Rafizi said through a parliamentary written reply, Prime Minister Najib Razak had revealed that up to Sept 24 this year, some 13,015 claims involving RM42 million in compensation had been paid out by insurance companies to the beneficiaries of BR1M recipients. In the reply, the government said it is looking at a more suitable mechanism to help the next-of-kin of BR1M recipients.

Rafizi questioned the rationale behind the premiums to the insurance companies, stressing that the extra payment would not have happened if the government had measured the right amount of payouts to be claimed by BR1M recipients.

“We want Najib to reveal the name of the company which received the commission in introducing i-BR1M to the insurance consortium and how much was paid,” he said. — The Malaysian Insider

This article first appeared in The Edge Financial Daily, on October 28, 2014.