🇲🇾 The Najib pardon Rorschach test — is it too much, or not enough?

Hello friends!

Najib Razak — say no more.

Erin Cook

🇲🇾 From 12 years to six for former PM

After a false start, it’s official. Former prime minister Najib Razak will serve only six years of his 12-year sentence in relation to 1MDB. He’s also got to pay US$10.5m in fines, down from $40m odd. Where ever will he find the money! 

The decision was made by the Pardons Board on the last day of former Agong Abdullah Ahmad Shah’s tenure (more on that below). The decision was reached “after weighing opinion and advice,” an official statement said, as reported by the Straits Times. Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim has stressed that it’s the Board’s decision and he didn’t have a hand in it. “Najib has every right to again appeal to the king. The process has to be respected,” he said in an interview with Al Jazeera last week (that I can’t find but was quoted by Straits Times). 

It’s a decision that’s left no one happy. Civil society is furious, for obvious reasons. But there are also a hell of a lot of Najib supporters, including UMNO, who want to see him sprung entirely. “A very unsatisfactory decision by the Pardons Board for all sides — be they for Najib’s imprisonment or against it,” Zaid Ibrahim, a former cabinet minister and lawyer for the wayward ex-PM, told reporters last week, as reported in this great piece from Straits Times. “This is what happens when the government of the day wants to try to appease everyone — no one is happy.”

Najib, for his part, is feeling “disappointed, very, very disappointed.” That’s according to Nooryana Najwa who told media last week that dad had been hoping for a full pardon, as per Malaysiakini. 

Anwar is struggling under the weight of anger. There’s a lot more to come here, but for an immediate take, this from Kevin Zhang for East Asia Forum is an excellent overview — if anything this latest development is just one more disappointment on the pile for voters. ‘The announcement sent a shockwave in Malaysian society, not least because Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim was widely perceived as a reformist against corruption. Anwar first stepped into international limelight during the turbulent 1997 Asian Financial Crisis, when he spearheaded the Reformasi movement which advocated for democracy and social justice,’ Zhang writes. 

The involvement of Abdullah of Pahang and the timing has raised eyebrows, but put those hairy things down! “Don’t blame the king. His Majesty is bound by the advice of the Pardons Board,” former MACC chief Latheefa Koya said in a post on Twitter and reported by Malaysiakini. The Federal Constitution says the king “shall accept” the advice and “that advice clearly was to reduce the sentence. Simple as that. So, stop spinning.”

Largely, the response has been muted — except for online. Former DAP MP Tony Pua has been hauled in for questioning over five Facebook posts which included a highly sarcastic screed that pissed off a Johor UMNO member who reported him for possibly violating the Sedition Act, Malaysiakini reported. And gags abounded online that Fahmi Reza better get ready to buy a new door — he got straight to drawing and reset that clock of having it kicked in.   

🇸🇬 Shou Chew goes Live in DC (does that work? I don’t know enough about TikTok to be snappy)

TikTok CEO Shou Chew has again had to convince US senators that he is not a member of the Chinese Communist Party nor an agent of the country. This is being reported in some quarters like ‘jeeze Americans are so dumb they don’t even know the difference between China and Singapore.’ And while I do believe Senator Tom Cotton, who briefly became Singapore’s most famous ang moh, probably is a dummy, what’s happening is more sinister. 

He’s trying to equate all ethnic Chinese people with the state of China and that’s bad enough for Hong Kongers and Taiwanese, but when it comes to a fully established sovereign state (uh oh, I’m approaching a line I can usually avoid in these pages) he’s doing the CCP’s bidding for them. This has cropped up before and the balance rope Singapore walks is fascinating and well navigated. But it’s TikTok, which means Cotton can push it far further.  

Wired has a nice long Q&A with Shou Chew if you’re so inclined. When he was asked who he admired as a child he said Lee Kuan Yew which the author was somewhat bewildered by: ‘He’d be an obvious North Star for a certain sort of politician; less so for the head of a social media company that got started with selfie dance videos,’ Dexter Thomas writes. 

Let’s wait and see if Singapore needs a Committee of Inquiry, Leader of the House Indranee Rajah said yesterday. It comes amid the fall-out of the corruption case that took out former transport minister S. Iswaran, whose time in court will begin at the start of March with a pre-trial hearing. The Committee of Inquiry is ‘appointed to look into matters including accidents involving death, serious injury or serious property damage, and incidents that may endanger public safety, public health or the management of a ministry,’ the Straits Times reports. The comments were in response to a Dixer from PAP’s MP Yip Hon Weng.

“There is no doubt that the government has taken a hit. It has suffered reputational damage, to say the least,” Eugene Tan, an associate professor of law at Singapore’s Management University, told Al Jazeera in this piece looking at the fall-out. “The full impact remains to be determined,” he added. More to come, by the sounds of it! 

Obsessed with this story from Today Online about the various university campuses of Singapore struggling under the weight of tourism. Nanyang Technological University has added a fee to cut down on demand. Why’s everyone coming to see the schools? This piece suggests Chinese parents are taking their kids to check out campus life while on holiday. Bummer, mum and dad. 

Muslims of Singapore can eat lab-grown meat, assuming cells come from halal meat only, Dr Nazirudin Mohd Nasir, the Mufti of Singapore, announced on Friday at a conference discussing Islam in contemporary society, Channel News Asia reports. I never even considered what would happen with lab-grown meat, so this is very fascinating to me. 

“We can be one of the first countries in the world to actually lead in this field, not only producing cultivated meat, but in also ensuring it is halal for Muslims to consume,” Masagos Zulkifli, Minister-in-charge of Muslim Affairs, told reporters on the sidelines of the event.