Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim on Saturday denied that his government had concealed any documents relating to jailed former premier Najib Razak’s home detention, the latest twist in the labyrinthine 1MDB corruption scandal.
Najib, 71, is pursuing a legal appeal that is seeking to convert his current prison term, which he is serving for his role in the 1MDB scandal, to house arrest. At the center of his legal case is an unpublished “addendum order” that he said was issued by the former king alongside a pardon that he received last January, entitling him to serve the remainder of his sentence at home.
Last week, the Court of Appeal in Putrajaya overturned a ruling handed down by the High Court in July, which dismissed Najib’s previous request that the court confirm the existence of and execute the royal order.
During the appeal hearing, Najib’s legal team produced a letter from the palace of the former king confirming the existence of the addendum, claiming that the authorities had purposefully ignored the latter. The ex-king’s palace later confirmed that the letter was “valid and authentic.”
In comments on Saturday, Anwar said the special order was sent to the attorney-general but not to him nor any other member of the board, which he sat on in 2023, prior to the handing down of the pardon. He added that “nothing was hidden.”
“The attorney-general then forwarded the documents to Istana Negara [the royal palace] when there was a change of king, as it is the king who chairs the Pardons Board,” Anwar said, as per the state news agency Bernama. “That’s how it happened, not something that we concealed.”
Under Malaysia’s unique system of rotational monarchy, the throne changes hands between the sultans of the nine Malay states every five years. Sultan Abdullah of Pahang finished his term on January 30 of last year, a day after approving Najib’s royal pardon, which halved his prison term from 12 to six years and sharply reduced his fine.
In 2020, a court found Najib guilty of abuse of power, criminal breach of trust, and money laundering for illegally receiving around $10 million from SRC International, a former unit of the state investment fund 1MDB. In August 2022, Najib lost his final appeal in the case and began his 12-year sentence at Kajang prison in Selangor. While battling additional 1MDB-related charges, he has since mounted a number of legal and political challenges in a bid to dilute or overturn the sentence, including requesting a royal pardon.
Anwar’s comments came after the Ministry of Law said on Friday that it had no record of any documents authorizing house arrest for Najib; it also denied receiving any official notification from the royal palace on the matter. “The law ministry, as secretariat to the pardons board, confirms that there are no additional documents or addendums in the official files or records under the ministry,” it said, according to a report by Reuters. The report added that the home and communications ministers “also said they were not aware of the existence of such a document.”
The fact that the existence of the addendum has seemingly been confirmed by the royal household of Pahang has put Anwar’s government in a tricky situation. The government’s denials regarding the royal addendum play into the claims of Najib and his supporters that the former leader has been the target of a political vendetta. In any event, if the king signed off on an order granting Najib the right to home detention, it would seem almost inevitable that he will sooner or later be released from prison.
Like the royal pardon itself, which was criticized for its supposed political favoritism, such a decision would likely be highly controversial. As I wrote after last week’s court decision, “any decision allowing him to serve his sentence at home would demonstrate ever more starkly the differential privileges that accrue to those with wealth and political power.” But bearing a royal imprimatur, the decision is not one that many will be willing to challenge publicly, for fear of falling afoul of Malaysia’s colonial-era Sedition Act, which has been used to prosecute people criticizing the country’s sultans.