YBs, please lend us your ears

Some of our lawmakers should re-focus their attention and find ways to help ease the cost of living.

IT’S disturbing, to say the least. We have economic issues that Malaysia needs to deal with seriously like the continuing uncertainty in the price of oil, market slowdown and slide in the value of our ringgit which is affecting our country’s coffers.

The cost of doing business has shot up against the backdrop of declining revenue and profits, which worries most Malaysians.

All of us, especially those in the middle and lower income groups, are grappling with the increasing cost of living. The worst hit are the wage earners living in major cities such as Kuala Lumpur, Johor Baru and Penang.

If our elected lawmakers have any idea of what the rakyat is going through, they should be focusing on ways to help ease the cost of living.

Never mind if they have to talk in the Dewan Rakyat till 5am. And to our Yang Berhormats, don’t expect us to sympathise with you, because get this – no one pressured you to be a Member of Parliament. You chose to stand for elections yourself.

But sadly for us, instead of having the chance to listen to top quality debates on ways to help Malaysia find new sources of revenue and not just depend on oil and palm oil, again, we find some of our legislators preferring to channel their energy into religious matters.

Not that religion isn’t a priority for us. It is, but the reality is this: we will never reach common ground.

So, PAS president Datuk Seri Abdul Hadi Awang has managed to table the controversial Private Member’s Bill to amend the Syariah Courts (Criminal Jurisdiction) Act or RUU355, but the debate on it has been deferred. That’s the furthest he gets.

He can keep saying that it will not affect non-Muslims, but the majority of non-Muslims know this to be untrue.

We are a plural society and no one community lives in isolation. Our lives are intertwined and entangled as Malaysians. There’s no such thing as laws that do not affect the entire community.

Abdul Hadi says it isn’t hudud, but hudud is written all over the Kelantan Syariah Criminal Code (II) Enactment (1993) (Amended 2015) and if Abdul Hadi’s Bill is passed, it will only give life to such laws on a national level.

Remember, even a poster of a Bollywood actress pinned up at a watch shop in Kelantan resulted in a non-Muslim shopkeeper being fined because the authorities thought the photograph was sexy. And not to mention the unisex hair salons which have long been penalised.

Abdul Hadi expects us to believe him when he says that non-Muslims will not be affected. And if we go by his “logic”, non-Muslims have no say over the matter.

The majority of Barisan Nasional component parties do not want this Bill – it is that simple – and we are glad that the Prime Minister understands that the coalition operates on consensus.

The fact is that the MCA and MIC have stood by Umno, even when it was at its lowest, since our independence. These are proven friends of more than six decades and not newfound pals who got together because of common political expediency.

Let’s get real. Umno isn’t going to move aside and allow PAS to contest in any constituency in the general election, nor will PAS allow the same for Umno.

Malaysia is a multicultural country founded on the principles of moderation. This is not a Middle East nation, even though the Muslims make up the majority of the population. We should be proud of our unique Malaysian way of life.

I studied Malay Literature for two years in the Sixth Form, sat for the examination (and passed) and when I entered university, I signed up for the Malay Letters Department courses at Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia.

I wanted to deepen my understanding and appreciation of the Malay arts. Not Arab arts. Malays are Muslims, not Arabs.

Over at the august House, even as Abdul Hadi became the focus of attention after tabling the Bill, we had to put up with Tasek Gelugor MP Datuk Shabudin Yahaya, who at one point suggested that rapists be allowed to marry their child victims as a solution to social problems.

He can keep blaming the press, claiming that he was quoted out of context, but there are certain basic remarks he made that he cannot run away from.

You can watch the video recording of what he said a few times and pause at certain parts of the video. It is pretty clear.

A girl who is nine years old may have reached puberty, but is she old enough to have sexual intercourse after she marries? A rational person would say that she is a child and should be in school or the playground with her friends.

This YB has put Malaysia in the international news for the wrong reason yet again (shame, shame) .... and so soon after the Beauty and The Beast fiasco too.

We can only cringe when we imagine what the world thinks of Malaysia. This is not to say that we wouldn’t readily refute any suggestion that our beautiful country is swamped by paedophiles or nutty lawmakers who are apologists for child marriages.

So, in the end, when Parliament found itself running out of time, we will remember this meeting as one where religious issues were the main concern.

As far as I recall, at least from media reports, no one talked about how we could take advantage of our weak ringgit to get more tourists to come visit us and how we could carry this out with limited funds for international promotions. We also didn’t hear how we could boost the soft economy after two years.

Maybe financial and economic matters are just too complicated for some of these MPs, with their limited knowledge. And these are YBs we have entrusted to speak up for us. After all, we put the future of Malaysia in their hands.


 by Wong chun wai On the beat The Star/ANN

Wong Chun Wai began his career as a journalist in Penang, and has served The Star for over 27 years in various capacities and roles. He is now the group's managing director/chief executive officer and formerly the group chief editor.

On The Beat made its debut on Feb 23 1997 and Chun Wai has penned the column weekly without a break, except for the occasional press holiday when the paper was not published. In May 2011, a compilation of selected articles of On The Beat was published as a book and launched in conjunction with his 50th birthday. Chun Wai also comments on current issues in The Star.

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The Star Says :Child marriages always wrong

Video of Shabudin’s remarks on child marriage goes viral

PETALING JAYA: A video of Datuk Shabudin Yahaya’s controversial statement about child marriages in Parliament has gone viral, which appears to raise questions on his claim that his remarks were taken out of context.

After coming under fire for suggesting in the Dewan Rakyat on Tues­day that it is all right for rapists to marry their child victims, the Te­­luk Gelugor MP issued a statement the next day to say that his words had been taken out of context.

In a three-page statement yesterday, Sha­budin continued to blame the media for the outcry over his re­­marks, even saying that their reports bordered on fake news.

In the Parliament recording, Sha­budin argued that it is not a pro­blem for children under 16 years old to marry as their body are phy­sically mature enough for marriage

He said a child who has reached puberty, even at nine years old, could be considered mature.

In some cases, he said, someone aged 12 and 15 could physically look like they were 18, and thus would be ready for marriage.

“In some instances, it is not im­­possible that they get married if they have reached puberty at the age of nine. A 12-year-old may have the body of an 18-year-old which means some girls are ‘physically and spiri­tually’ ready for marriage,” he said.

The former Syariah Court judge is mulling over legal action against the media.

In yesterday’s statement, Shabu­din said his remarks during the debate on the Sexual Offences Against Children Bill 2017 on Tues­day led to an unnecessary outcry after they were inaccurately interpreted in reports by both local and international news organisations.

“In their reports and headlines, both the local and international media gave the perception that I had condoned rapists being allowed to marry underage victims to avoid punishment.

“This is inaccurate and misleading and borders on fake news,” he said.

The Barisan Nasional MP said he had stressed during the debate that rape is a crime whether consensual or otherwise.

“At no point in time did I suggest that the rapists are forced to marry the victims nor did I say that the crime of rape is automatically dropped after marriage.

Shabudin explained that he had given his opinion that the courts should be allowed to rule on cases of statutory rape involving consenting partners, and treat such cases diffe­rently from non-consensual rape, as opposed to an outright ban on underage marriages.

He made the remarks in response to the suggestion by Kulai DAP MP Teo Nie Ching to include child marriage as an offence in the proposed law.

The legal age for marriage in Malaysia is 21 without parental consent, and 18 with parental consent, while the legal age of consent is 16.

However, in certain cases, those below the legal age can marry if given a special marriage licence from the head of their state government or approved by the court.

In a related development, Women, Family and Community Develop­ment Minister Datuk Seri Rohani Abdul Karim defended Shabudin, saying that being a former Syariah Court judge, he had encountered all these scenarios.

“He was not implying that a nine-year-old girl can get married, but rather, he was being detailed in his explanation,” Rohani told reporters at a function yesterday.

She said Shabudin has been “very supportive” of the Bill as he himself had presided over cases of sexual crimes against children.

In Ipoh, Gerakan adviser Tan Sri Chang Ko Youn urged Shabudin to do the right thing and apologise.

“What he said is outrageous. No matter what he tries to say now, the damage has already been done. He should apologise,” he said.

“Otherwise he would present himself as a subject of ridicule and be a liability to Barisan Nasional in the next general election.

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Stop bitting the helping hand    

After Barclays, the golden age of finance is dead

Retribution and regulation are sure to follow the Barclays scandal, but if the City is shackled, Britain as a whole will suffer

Everyone's a loser: punishing the City is inevitable following the Barclays scandal, but the whole of Britain could suffer Photo:

Just when you thought bankers could sink no lower in public regard, they’ve done it. News that Barclays has been found guilty of repeatedly falsifying the interbank rate – sometimes for the personal gain of traders, sometimes to make the bank itself seem more creditworthy than it really was – tops off another calamitous week in the seemingly never-ending litany of banking misdemeanours.

Coming hard on the heels of the chaos surrounding an IT breakdown at Royal Bank of Scotland, it is as if bankers are actively out to confirm their reputation for recklessness, incompetence and self-enriching disregard for the interests of customers and the wider economy.

At a time when the political and regulatory backlash against finance is already at fever pitch, much of it ill-thought out, counterproductive and economically harmful, there could scarcely have been a more spectacular own goal. And it doesn’t end there. Banking faces a whole new raft of separate regulatory strictures over the mis-selling of interest rate swaps to business customers.

A year ago, Bob Diamond, chief executive of Barclays, told a committee of MPs that it was time to put the crisis behind us, move on and stop apologising for the failings of the past. He should be so lucky. Not since the Thirties has finance been so much in the dock. On and on the combination of retribution and regulatory crackdown will go until banking is once again thought sufficiently imprisoned to be safe. European policymakers will delight in the ammunition they have been given to rein in the Anglo-Saxon bankers and make them subject to the rule of Brussels and Frankfurt.

Many have already said it, but it is one of those observations that bears constant repetition: in all my years as a financial journalist, it’s hard to recall a case quite as shameful as this – and I’ve certainly seen a few.

There is no industry in all commerce that relies as much on public trust and reputation for probity as banking. We have seen what happens when trust is lost: we get the legion of banking runs that lie at the heart of the financial crisis; people run for the hills and the economy grinds to a halt.

To have American regulators accuse Barclays of lies, deception and manipulation is an appalling indictment of one of the oldest and most respected names in British banking. It is like discovering that your local branch manager has routinely raided your hard-earned savings to finance his champagne lifestyle.

Entrusted with the public’s money, bankers have to be seen as whiter than white, pillars of their community and morally beyond reproach. All these old-fashioned virtues seem to have been lost in pursuit of the easy rewards of international finance. “My word is my bond” – once one of the sacred principles of City finance – has become reduced to a laughable parody of itself.

Now, it may well be unfair to single out Barclays. We already know that at least 20 other banks are under investigation for alleged manipulation of interbank interest rates, including most of the other UK high street banks. It could be that others are equally at fault. We know about Barclays only because in a practice that City lawyers sometimes call “rowing for the shore”, it has decided to abandon the flotilla of co-defendants and settle with regulators.

Downside of plea bargain

In so doing, it may have succeeded in winning both a lower fine and immunity from criminal prosecution, as a corporate entity at least, though the individuals involved may not escape. The downside of such plea bargains is that they involve admission of guilt. The regulator gets free rein to be as critical as it likes, while the mitigation of any defence there might have been is lost.

That these practices appear to have been endemic, not just at Barclays, but across a wide range of international banks, neither excuses nor explains what happened.

It’s interesting that when the fines were first announced on Wednesday, there was barely a flicker of recognition in the Barclays share price. The investigation has been known about for some time, the misdeeds complained of date back three or more years and are therefore water under the bridge, and many in the City judged Barclays to have got off relatively lightly.

But as the night wore on, the seriousness of the situation began to sink in. Bob Diamond, the Barclays chief executive, long despised by regulators found himself politically friendless, too.

As calls for his head mounted, the share price began to plunge. The key concern about Barclays has always been that it is a “black box” operation that only Bob himself properly understands. At a time of growing financial chaos, Barclays could be left leaderless, with the investment banking brains behind much of its recent profitability and successful navigation of the banking crisis thrown to the wolves.

“Bob is mistrusted in the City,” says one seasoned fund manager, “but he’s the glue that holds the whole thing together. Without him it might well disintegrate.”

What went wrong?
 
So what really went wrong here? The London Interbank Offered Rate, or Libor, and its companion, Euribor, are two of the most important benchmarks in finance. Essentially, they are an aggregate of the rates at which banks lend to one another. They are also used to help price a vast array of lending decisions and derivative products, including mortgages.

Yet even in financial markets, it is not widely understood how these benchmarks are arrived at. Unbeknown to senior managers at Barclays, some traders, starting in around 2005 and stretching through to 2009, began persuading those responsible for compiling Barclays’ input to distort the rate in a manner that made their own derivative positions more profitable, hence the excruciating series of incriminating emails cited by regulators.

This was bad enough, but if it had stopped there, the damage would probably have been containable. Even the best of internal controls cannot prevent the determined rotten apple. What has transformed this case into something much more serious is that at the height of the banking crisis “senior managers” themselves – it is still not clear exactly who – ordered that the Barclays submission be manipulated so as to make it look as if the bank was receiving more favourable funding terms than it was. Deceitful behaviour seemed to have become endemic, stretching from top to bottom.

To the extent that there is a defence for such blatant deceits, it runs something like this; everyone else was doing the same thing. Rival banks that were plainly in even worse shape than Barclays were making Libor submissions that appeared to show they were enjoying more favourable wholesale funding rates than Barclays was. On the “if you cannot beat them” principle, Barclays determined to join them.

If this version of events is correct, the whole escapade doesn’t look as bad as it first appears. It is hard to identify who exactly lost out as a result of these fictions. Since there was no interbank funding to speak of at the height of the crisis, it may not in any case have mattered very much.

Even so, it’s quite damning enough. There appears to be nothing bankers will stop at in order to feather their own nests. With tempers already at boiling point over egregious levels of pay and aggressive tax avoidance, the whole affair has now taken on a life of its own.

When the history books are written, this may be seen as a defining moment, the point at which public anger with the banks bubbled over into something much more seismic in its consequences than the general atmosphere of bank bashing we have seen to date. Despite the crisis, there has been a sense of back to business as normal for the City these past three years.

There have been few signs of behavioural change. But this may be the straw that breaks the camel’s back.

Market and regulatory pressures are already laying waste to great tracts of previously highly lucrative banking activity. A major cull of investment banking jobs is expected over the next year, with once bumper bonuses and earnings much reduced on top. Retribution and punishingly restrictive levels of regulation won’t be far behind.

Those who believe that Britain has become too dependent on finance for its own good will no doubt welcome this humbling of an apparently out-of-control City, but they should be careful what they wish for.

Finance’s golden age may be drawing to a close; with no new industry or manufacturing renaissance coming up in the wings, it is not entirely clear what’s going to take its place as a source of British wealth, jobs and tax revenues. It is not just finance for which hard times lie ahead. - Telegraph

By Jeremy Warner

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The Malay rights group, Perkasa’s white packets to corrupt or ignorance of ethnic culture?

Perkasa President, Ibrahim Ali (picture) is  a MP. 

Young leaders see red over Perkasa’s white packets

By LEE YEN MUN and SIRA HABIBU newsdesk@thestar.com.my 

PETALING JAYA: No excuse.

That’s the reaction from several young MCA leaders over Perkasa’s white ‘ang pow’ distributed at its Chinese New Year gathering on Sunday.

Money given out in white packets is traditionally associated with the pak kam (white gold), which are donations given at a funeral.

MCA Young Professionals Bureau chief Datuk Chua Tee Yong said there was no excuse for what Perkasa did.

“Perkasa should have been aware. They should have learnt the practices of another race before organising such an event, so that they did not upset anyone,” said Chua.

MCA Youth secretary-general Datuk Chai Kim Sen described Perkasa’s white ‘ang pows’ as disrespectful and not knowing this was not an excuse.

“(Perkasa president) Datuk Ibrahim Ali should act in the people’s interest by understanding our multi-cultural society which he represents as a Member of Parliament,” Chai said in a statement.



On his Twitter handle @weekasiongmp, MCA Youth chief Datuk Dr Wee Ka Siong slammed “some people” for not understanding the meaning of ang pow.

“Ang pow, in the Hokkien dialect, means red packet. If you want give an ang pow to your friends, make sure the colour is RED,” Dr Wee wrote.

Perkasa deputy president Datuk Rahman Bakar had said on Sun- day that the white packets were the only mini envelopes they had and that they did not know if some may be offended by the colour.

Meanwhile, Perkasa secretary-general Syed Hassan Syed Ali said they had no idea that white packets was taboo among the Chinese community.

“To us, white symbolises purity and sincerity. If we had known that it is wrong to give out white packets, we would not have done it,” he said.

Syed Hassan said the media should have highlighted Perkasa’s attempt to forge greater harmony, rather than harping on an honest mistake.

Perkasa's 'white envelope' ang pow nothing to do with govt

KUALA LUMPUR: The use of white envelopes along with the customary ang pow red packets at Perkasa's Chinese New Year gathering last Sunday has nothing to do with the Government, said Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Tun Razak.

He said the leader of the non-governmental organisation (NGO), Datuk Ibrahim Ali, is an independent member of parliament. Perkasa is a Malay right-wing group.

"As such, the white packet distributed at the Chinese New Year function should not be construed to be acceptance by the Government," Najib said in a posting on his Chinese-language 'Ah Jib Gor' Facebook page.

"I think that as long as we can have a better understanding of Chinese culture and promote sensitivity to cultural taboos, such controversial events can be avoided.

"We all know that ang pow means a red envelope, dominated by red rather than other colours," he said, adding that the incident can be used as a social experience.

On Monday, Perkasa was asked to apologise for insulting the Chinese community by using white envelopes as ang pow packets at its first Chinese New Year open house. White envelopes are reserved for funerals in Chinese custom.

Gerakan vice-president Datuk Mah Siew Keong had said that giving cash in white envelopes during Chinese New Year, which is meant to be a prosperous and joyful festival, showed that Perkasa chief Ibrahim Ali was "greatly insensitive and insincere".

MCA Youth secretary-general Chai Kim Sen said Perkasa's action was disrespectful to Chinese culture and custom.

He said Ibrahim should act in the people's interests and understand the multi-cultural society and the taboos and prohibitions of each ethnic group and religion.

Perkasa deputy president Datuk Abdul Rahman Bakar had explained that due to the large turnout at the open house at the Sultan Sulaiman Club in Kampung Baru, the red ang pow packets ran out and white envelopes were used instead. - Bernama