Not all MACC cases end up in court, says Dahlan

PETALING JAYA: An investigator should not be a prosecutor at the same time, says Minister in the Prime Minister's Department Abdul Rahman Dahlan.He was commenting on Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission (MACC) senior officer Bahri Mohamad Zain's statement that he had opted for early retirement due to frustration over the outcome of the investigation into SRC International (SRC).

Bahri, who played a pivotal role in the SRC probe, said that a large sum of public money had been embezzled but no one had been brought to justice for it.

"I believe in check and balance, and our judicial system where investigations and prosecutions are separated," Rahman told FMT.

"MACC's job is to investigate, but this doesn't mean it will lead to a prosecution.

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"If the Attorney-General (AG) states that there is no merit for the case to be brought to court, then we have to believe that it was decided based on the facts presented to him."

Rahman, who is the minister in charge of the Economic Planning Unit, said when he was a member of the MACC special committee on corruption, he too had questioned why some cases couldn't result in prosecution.

"Sometimes it was because the evidence obtained wasn't strong enough, other times it could be the investigation wasn't complete, or that there really was no criminal element to it."

This, he added, showed that Bahri's SRC probe was not the first, and neither would it be the last to end up with a "No Further Action" stamp.

"Even with the cases that end up in court, we do not necessarily see all the judges on the bench handing out the same verdict.

"For example, the Court of Appeals and the Federal Court where you often have a two against one verdict, or a three against two. "It doesn't mean that either of them is wrong. It's all about the interpretation of the facts and evidence presented to them," said Rahman.

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Bahri, the former director of MACC's Special Operations Division, began investigating SRC after the former subsidiary of state-owned 1MDB was found to have transferred RM42 million into Prime Minister Najib Razak's personal bank account.

AG Mohamed Apandi Ali cleared Najib of the SRC case and in a written reply to Wong Chen (PKR-Kelana Jaya) in Parliament in March last year, the prime minister said SRC had no record of the purported money transfer.

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