Hasan must clear air over Deepak’s loan repayment
The Malaysian Insider – 11 hours agoRELATED CONTENT
- Hasan must clear air over Deepak’s loan repayment
It is too easy. Naive even to believe that Datuk Seri Hasan Malek woke up one day and decided that he had to help Malaysia's most famous carpet dealer get the deal of his life from Bank Rakyat.
No disrespect to the minister but he is a lightweight politician, a man whose claim to fame is that he attended the marriage of the Prime Minister and his wife. The man from Negri Sembilan does not have either the political heft or standing in the Cabinet or Umno to instruct the board of Bank Rakyat to do anything, let alone allow Deepak Jaikishan (pic) to repay a RM32 million loan sans the interest accrued.
Oh sure, as the minister of Domestic Trade, Cooperatives and Consumerism, he is in charge of the bank but not to the extent that he can scuttle the governance process of the financial institution.
Unless, the first time minister was given political cover by someone more powerful.
To recap, the allegation of Hasan's intervention was made by former Bank Rakyat chairman Tan Sri Sabbaruddin Chik, who noted that the board initially rejected the sweetheart deal which called for Deepak to be allowed to issue 250 post-dated cheques and pay the debt over a period of 10 years – an unheard of concession in the banking circles.
Sabbaruddin said that Hasan was unhappy that the board rejected the sweetheart deal and threatened to sack all of the board members. The Domestic Trade, Cooperatives and Consumerism minister allegedly wrote a letter instructing Bank Rakyat to proceed with the deal as proposed by Deepak.
The minister has since defended the sweetheart deal, saying that it was above board and that everything was done "according to government policies, law and regulations".
Really? What makes Deepak so special that he gets to repay a loan over a 10-year period with post-dated cheques? He is a carpet dealer whose only claim to fame was that he was thick with the First Family.
Based on previous disclosures by Deepak, this is what we can surmise: he was close to the First Family and was even involved intimately in the move to deal with the inconvenient business of the statutory declaration by private detective P. Balasubramaniam that suggested that Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak knew murdered Mongolian model Altantuya Shariibuu.
According to him, he and Najib's brother persuaded the late private investigator to retract the statutory declaration and replace it with another one which absolved powerful figures in Putrajaya of having any knowledge of Altantuya.
About a year ago, Deepak grabbed the headlines with a series of allegations, including his business dealings with the PM's wife. He gave the impression of a close business relationship that had soured and threatened to reveal more juicy details on transactions and the Altantuya case.
Najib rubbished Deepak's credibility but surprisingly did not commence any legal proceedings against the carpet seller. The businessman's critics alleged that he had a series of bank loans amounting to millions of ringgit which the financial institutions were recalling, putting him on the precipice of bankruptcy.
But he never became a bankrupt and the talk in the grapevine was that several banks took major haircuts on loans to him. Sabbaruddin's allegations show that this talk may have much substance.
Hasan cannot just swat away the serious accusation that he abused his ministerial powers to offer a businessman a deal that would not have been available to a less well-connected businessman. Hasan needs to explain to Malaysians why Deepak merited special attention. – May 30, 2014.
