UMNO delegate offered RM200,000 bribe

Umno delegate offered RM200,000 bribe
Malay Mail
November 21, 2008
Categories: News
An Umno delegate says he was offered RM200,000 before his division’s annual general meeting last month to nominate certain candidates for posts in the party’s March elections.
Datuk Kadar Shah Sulaiman, who sits in the Muar Umno committee, said “Umno will face a serious credibility problem if the party leadership does not arrest this menace soon”.
Kadar, who lodged a complaint with the Umno headquarters on the attempt to bribe him, said members were concerned that the party disciplinary board was slow to act on the almost 1,000 complaints on money politics and abuse of power filed during the month-long divisional annual general meetings that ended on Nov 9.

This being the case, Kadar said, party president Datuk Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi should put off the March elections until investigations into all the complaints are completed.
“It should not be allowed to go on as the credibility of the election process and the candidates are doubtful,” he said.

“It is money talk now for candidates and delegates alike. Candidates who want to be nominated will pay and delegates, on the other hand, put a price on their votes. This is worrying ... it happened during the recently concluded divisional elections, and we are yet to reach the assembly hall.”

Kadar, whose late father Tun Sulaiman Ninam Shah was a former permanent chairman of Umno, said Abdullah should allow Umno’s disciplinary board and the Anti-Corruption Agency (ACA) to invetsigate all the complaints before proceeding with the elections.
“Surely, there is some truth to some of the complaints. Don’t tell me that all the 1,000-odd complaints are false? Even if you throw away half the cases, we still have 500 complaints that could be true. Half that and you still get at least 250 complaints that ought to be legitimate,” he said.

“With that many complaints, do we still want to continue with the party elections, knowing pretty well that some of the complainants even supplied evidence of candidates and delegates paying or accepting money? “Let us not insult the intelligence of the man-on-the-street. They expect the 2,600-odd Umno delegates to elect the best candidates as leaders and yet, there is the risk that some of the winners would have paid their way up.

“If the investigations are not completed before the elections take place, what do we do when the leaders elected are later found to be guilty of money politics?” Kadar added.

Umno has for long been beset with the problem of money politics, prompting some quarters to express misgivings about the protracted period between the completion of the divisional meetings and the national elections in March.

Some predict abuses to take place, with even former Umno president Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad joining the chorus. The former prime minister has promised to reveal the identities of Umno members implicated in money politics in his influential blog. He said he was willing to be sued for defamation, even risk arrest, by exposing the truth and the identities of errant members. “I can’t do anything about the complaints except to hand these over to the Umno disciplinary committee. I will put the names up in my blog,” Dr Mahathir said.