EDITOR'S NOTE
SHEER fatigue caused me to gripe when the stack of documents landed on my desk. Don’t get me wrong, I love a good scoop, but as one half of a two-man team – and the younger of the two – the running around was left mostly to me. As the one supposedly with the better eye-sight it was also my job to run through the hundreds of pages of literature with a fine tooth comb and highlighter. Irony is I wear glasses but Citizen Nades doesn’t! And you wonder how Nades makes it all seem so easy. The fact that he has 20 more years of experience may have something to do with it.
So here we were near exhaustion following the shenanigans of the late Datuk Zakaria Deros, he of the Istana Zakaria fame. The Finance Department was already questioning our travel claims – almost daily to Port Klang. Just when I thought we would see the last of Nades’ birth place for a while, we were driving back there again to pursue this thing called the “free zone” – a topic that took me out of my own comfort zone and exposed me to new terms such as TEUs and made me wish I had paid more attention in Business School.
The more information and documents we received, the more we realised that we were on to a goldmine – in journalistic terms of course, although there were others who literally saw the Free Zone as exactly that!
As such, it was time for The Sun’s Special Reports and Investigations Team to reassess its priorities – the dozen or so stories we were working on simultaneously had to be dropped for PKFZ.
Sitting in a London Pub with Lorrain Osman in July 2008, Nades and I were quizzing him on the BMF scandal of two decades ago where RM2.5 billion of our money were squandered.
Although he had granted us the one and only interview he will probably ever give, Lorrain made one thing clear, that he will take the identities of the key players and the extent of their involvement to his grave.
The longest serving remand prisoner has a lot of hurt but in the twilight of his life, has come to peace with himself and the events which painted him as a pariah back home. But we enlightened him on the PKFZ affair, the cost of which at that time was put at RM4.6 billion; and which was going to dethrone BMF as the nation’s largest financial scandal.
History will teach us nothing if we fail to learn from it. Hence this is what Lorrain had to say of scandals following BMF, in particular PKFZ: “Always maintain several layers of supervision. Many of today’s banking problems have been allowed to happen because of this lack of effective supervision or oversight.” How true. This book and the PKFZ reports since 2004 that Nades and I have written, reveal the failures and the refusal of our system of administration and guardians of our coffers to learn from past mistakes.
Who is to say that there isn’t a 20-year cycle of financial disasters that will eventually bring this nation to its knees?
Thankfully there are many among us with something called a conscience. I for one am proud to associate myself with the author of this book who has developed a reputation as the nation’s conscience since his foray into journalism almost four decades ago. My mentor and most of all, my friend for the past 10 years, Nades’ passion for his craft is characterised by his tenacity in getting to the truth.
While others would have been overwhelmed by fatigue and exasperation with the tonnes of documents, roadblocks set up by officialdom and red herrings thrown by the culprits; Nades is the epitome of perseverance. An irony of sorts since he is the most impatient person I have ever known!
Our patience is yet again tested as we enter the final lap of the PKFZ saga, with more red herrings, bureaucracy and even threats being thrown our way. By the end of this book, the reader would have realised that we have come too far and given too much to back down, and that the truth will ultimately prevail. This book outlines the course of our investigations from watering holes, golf courses and Bak Kut Teh stalls to the hallowed grounds of Parliament and the imposing corridors of Putrajaya that whisper their own versions of what actually took place and who the key players are. Many of them had been mentioned in our reports, while others are those whose identities are still hushed but not unknown.
I am privileged that Nades brought me along for the ride. He had embarked on this story in the midst of personal tragedy and this book is put together in memory of a young lady who for 19 years displayed passion and principles which mirrored those of her father. She epitomised the next generation of Malaysians who would one day question us for being idle as grave ills were being conducted by those in an administration want of accountability, for the benefit of thieves and profiteers.
Terence Fernandez
1 October 2009 |
