PETALING JAYA: Former prime minister Najib Razak, responding to DAP allegations of political revenge over a cancelled loan, said the party should instead consider Lim Guan Eng’s actions against the Kelantan state government when he was finance minister.
Najib said Lim had publicly criticised Kelantan as a failed government in 2018 when he announced approval of a RM22.5 million federal loan to the state.
“The saddest thing is that Kelantan actually asked for an advance of RM24.5 million but the ‘minister of shadow play’ only approved RM22.5 million to pay the salaries of Kelantan civil servants,” said Najib.
“He was willing to dicker over RM2 million for Kelantan and even mentioned it at a press conference. But he was quiet about approving a guarantee for a RM2 billion foreign loan to Penang,” Najib said.
The federal government had been accused of taking political revenge against the DAP by cancelling the guarantee for the loan from the Asian Development Bank, which Najib revealed in a posting on Friday.
Bukit Mertajam MP Steven Sim of the DAP had described the move as a “disappointing, despicable act of political vendetta” against the state and people of Penang.
Najib said the RM2 billion loan was never announced to Malaysians and was never reported in the media at that time. “It was only made public last week in the Dewan Rakyat,” Najib said.
He reminded the DAP that the Pakatan Harapan government had cancelled a RM1 billion allocation to repair dilapidated schools in Sarawak which he had approved in the 2018 budget.
He said Lim had then demanded that Sarawak repay its debt to the federal government if the state wanted the money for the schools, even though the allocation had been approved in the 2018 budget.
“Has DAP forgotten what the real meaning of political revenge is? Try asking Guan Eng,” said Najib.