PUTRAJAYA: Calling the latest allegations against him “baseless smears and insinuations”, Datuk Seri Najib Razak ordered his lawyers yesterday to take legal action against two Australian dailies following reports on Tuesday accusing him of involvement in a bribery scandal.

In a statement on its Facebook page, the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) said the article does not contain a single direct allegation about Najib as there is not one shred of evidence that the prime minister was in any way involved in the case which has already been decided by the courts, with individuals convicted and punished.

“Instead of providing evidence to link the prime minister to the case, the article relies heavily on a series of slippery, non-conclusive words — ‘suspected’, ‘alleged’, ‘suggesting’ — to lead the reader into thinking that the prime minister is guilty by association.

“The prime minister has instructed his legal counsel to take all action possible against The Age and Sydney Morning Herald,” the statement said.

Yesterday, The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald, both owned by Australia’s Fairfax Media group, said senior officials in the Australian government were aware of intelligence that implicates people in the offices of both Najib and his predecessor Tun Abdullah Ahmad Badawi in a corruption case.

The case triggered the prosecution of several Australian businessmen who worked for companies given the contract to turn Malaysian paper notes into polymer notes.

The Sydney Morning Herald’s report yesterday said that Canberra’s requests for information from Putrajaya about the case had gone unheeded. It said Malaysia was paying no attention to the “formal mutual assistance” request from the Commonwealth Attorney-General’s Department to provide information about the financial dealings of a group of middlemen. These middlemen were allegedly close to those in Najib and Abdullah’s offices, Sydney Morning Herald said, and had arranged for Malaysian officials to be bribed into accepting Australian contracts to turn paper bank notes into polymer between the late 1990s and 2009.

However, Najib dismissed the articles in the two Australian newspapers yesterday, saying that the alleged bribes had taken place during the administration of his fiercest critic, Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad.

A statement posted on the Prime Minister’s Office website yesterday said the bribes were alleged to have been paid over the period of 1999 to 2004, during the administration of former prime ministers Tun Abdullah Badawi and Dr Mahathir.

“Yet Fairfax Media chose not to mention Tun Mahathir anywhere in its article.

“This is despite knowing that the alleged bribes took place not during Prime Minister Najib’s tenure, but during Tun Mahathir’s; and despite Tun Mahathir being named in the suppression order regarding the case obtained by the Australian government.

“Instead, the entire article including its headline and photos focuses on and smears Prime Minister Najib,” PMO said, adding that it might not be coincidental that Fairfax Media said it had separate information from “high-level sources”.

PMO also questioned what Najib had to do with the case as the alleged bribery took place before he led the government. — The Malaysian Insider

This article first appeared in The Edge Financial Daily, on July 16, 2015.