Another day, another multibillion-dollar corruption scandal in Malaysia. 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB), one of the world’s largest ever financial heists, had earlier put the Southeast Asian nation in the global spotlight along with newly incarcerated former premier Najib Razak, who stands accused of pilfering billions of dollars of public funds.
Another Najib-era scandal has since gripped Malaysia, this time involving the country’s largest-ever defense procurement deal. The Public Accounts Committee (PAC), a parliamentary oversight body, highlighted in an August 4 report that 1.4 billion ringgit (US$314 million) in government allocations toward the purchase of six littoral combat ships (LCS) was diverted for other purposes.
Envisioned as the lynchpin of the Royal Malaysian Navy’s (RMN) transformation program to replace aging foreign-made vessels with locally-built frontline warships, the ships were due to be delivered from 2019. Despite paying 6 billion ($1.3 billion) of the project’s total 9 billion ringgit ($2 billion) cost, not a single ship, nor even their detailed design documents, have been completed to date.
A former defense ministry official who requested anonymity described the deal as “a complete clusterfuck of a procurement” in an interview with Asia Times. “A large part of the LCS fiasco is the fact that the ministry agreed to contractual terms that would otherwise not have ever passed procurement standards in any serious organization with that much money to burn,” the official said.
Read the full story at Asia Times.
Nile Bowie is a journalist and correspondent with the Asia Times covering current affairs in Singapore and Malaysia. He can be reached at nilebowie@gmail.com.
