KUALA LUMPUR (Jan 30): The High Court has granted former attorney general Tan Sri Tommy Thomas time to find a new lawyer in his case against a special task force set up by the government to probe the contents of his memoir, after the passing of his lawyer Datuk Seri Gopal Sri Ram.

“The judge set Feb 27 for Thomas to inform the court of his status in finding a new counsel for the case,” senior federal counsel Nur Irmawatie Daud told The Edge after case management on Monday (Jan 30).

The case management before judge Datuk Wan Ahmad Farid Wan Salleh was held to set a date for the government’s application to strike out the lawsuit brought by Thomas, on the grounds that it was "scandalous, frivolous, vexatious and an abuse of the court’s process".

Thomas, in his suit, claims that the government has no legal standing to probe his book and that the report the task force released on it was illegal.

Last October, then prime minister Datuk Seri Ismail Sabri Yaakob said Thomas was believed to have committed four offences, based on investigations into the contents of the former attorney general's memoir My Story: Justice In the Wilderness.

Ismail Sabri said the offences relate to the Penal Code, the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission (MACC) Act and the Official Secrets Act. “We will leave this to the relevant authorities: if it is [an] MACC case, the MACC will investigate, if it is under the Penal Code, the police will investigate,” he said.

The report by the special task force that looked into Thomas’ memoir had been declassified and made available on the website of the legal affairs division of the Prime Minister’s Department, Ismail Sabri said.

Police, meanwhile, said at the time that they were in the midst of investigating the claims made in the book and had indicated that they were about to complete the probe.

Read also:
Gopal Sri Ram passes away