Suara Keadilan: KADIR JASIN ASK WHERE THE UMNO BILLIONS EGYPT DISSOLVES FORMER RULING PARTYCOURT ORDERS FUNDS AND PROPERTY OF THE NATIONAL DEMOCRATIC PARTY TO BE HANDED OVER TO THE GOVERNMENT.

Many NDP senior leaders like former parliament member Ahmed Ezz are now behind bars [EPA]

An Egyptian court has dissolved the former ruling National Democratic Party (NDP) and ordered its funds and property to be handed over to the government.

The Higher Administrative Court issued the order on Saturday, meeting one of the key demands of the protest movement that ousted former president Hosni Mubarak in February.

“The administrative court issued a ruling to dissolve the NDP and seize its money, and its headquarters and buildings will be handed to the government,” a judicial source said.

Lawyers had raised a suit demanding the party’s dissolution, accusing it of corruption.

The NDP dominated Egyptian politics since it was set up by Mubarak’s predecessor, Anwar el-Sadat, in 1978.

Much of its senior leadership is now behind bars on suspicion of embezzlement.

Rebranding efforts

Al Jazeera’s Zeina Khodr, reporting from Cairo, said that to the protesters the NDP symbolises people who had misused their excessive powers.

However, she said there had been efforts recently to rebrand the party: “The new secretary-general is Talat el-Sadat, an outspoken opposition figure and nephew of Anwar el-Sadat.

“There’s a statement coming out from the new figures in the party which is now to be called the New National Party. What they’re saying is that they’re going to rid the party of corrupt officials and that there were some honest people who would run as independents but had no other choice but to join the party because of the situation in the country.”

The move to dissolve NDP was the latest concession by Egypt’s military rulers to demands of the protest movement, coming days after Mubarak and his sons were put under detention for investigation on allegations of corruption and involvement in the killing of protesters.

Protesters had suspected that the party could have become a powerful contender in the first post-Mubarak parliament elections due in September.

The party’s headquarters were torched during the protests that led Mubarak to step down, and its supporters were blamed for attacking pro-democracy demonstrations.

Assets financial, moral and honourable and a trifling matter of billions were called into question this week after the scribe A Kadir Jasin, sometime chief editor of NSTP group, aimed an artful screed at the learned and eloquent Zaid Ibrahim of Parti Keadilan Rakyat.

What had seemed to be a timely and newsworthy profile of Zaid quickly ballooned into a question of billions in Umno assets including the Umno media empire, of Kadir’s own credibility as a journalist and his performance in leading the NSTP group in the 1990s.

A whole can of worms could be opened with further inquiries down this track. And someone really should.

“Follow the money” said Deep Throat, the government source who fed Bob Woodward of the Washington Post in his now legendary takedown of President Richard Nixon though his exposés with fellow-reporter Carl Bernstein in the 1970s.

Kadir Jasin on Zaid
The Hurricane Hattie Of PR
Wherever she went in Thornapple’s household, she created havoc. So is the Umno-nominated Kelantan Senator.

RPK on Kadir
We are talking about billions here … Can Kadir Jasin please address this and raise the right questions

Zaid on Kadir
Dia kata dia tidak berniat jahat tetapi setiap ayat yang ditulisnya berbau busuk dan jahat.

Zaid’s letter to Mkini
I ask Kadir how did he perform when he was the top man in the largest Bumiputera-owned newspaper group?

Kadir on the MBO

Follow the money.

And the trail will wend through the turbulent years of the late 1980s and 1990s, fuelled by abundant petro-ringgits, to the events of Umno dying and Umno Baru rising, through Kadir’s own relationship with Umno’s grey financial eminence Daim Zainuddin, and with Dr Mahathir Mohamad, and Anwar Ibrahim as well.

Kadir will have much to reveal about Umno asset shuffling involving NSTP, TV3, a management buyout through a little-known company Realmild, go-go Umno conglomerate Renong, PLUS, Malaysian Resources Corp Bhd the Sentral developer, and leading up to the current asset shuffling involving Media Prima.

And also how Kadir, son of a Kedah padi farmer, became for the price of RM1 the owner of the Berita Publishing mini-empire.

Oh, the stories he could tell.

Kadir opened himself to attack on these issues when picking on Zaid, who was in the political news again because of PKR’s internal squabbling over Sabah.

Waving the friendly flag of “no malice intended”, AKJ likened Zaid to aHurricane Hattie, a whirling dervish of deviousness and dissent everywhere he landed. The thrust of AKJ’s article left no doubt as to his intent: to sow more seeds of discontent within PKR.

No doubt he wished in the process to paint a cloud over Zaid’s head, perhaps fearful that Sabahans might otherwise see a halo where, in Kadir’s eyes, none existed.

Quickly into the fray came Raja Petra Kamaruddin of Malaysia Today. RPK drew his sights on what Kadir had implied about Zaid’s getting rich from rescuing Umno assets after it was deregistered in 1987 — and raised more questions about Umno assets and Kadir’s own knowledge of, and role in, Umno’s asset shuffling.

We are talking about billions here, and they were registered in the name of trustees … Can Kadir Jasin please address this and raise the right questions as to where those assets currently are? … Are these interests still in the name of these proxies? And if so where is the money? …Remember, PLUS, MAS, TV3, NST, Utusan, DRB-Hicom, etc., etc. etc.? What role did these proxies like Tan Sri Yahya Ahmad, Halim Saad, Shamsudin Abu Hassan, and many, many more play?

…did the pagar eat the padi?

Yes, Kadir Jasin, let’s talk about that now.
‣ Raja Petra | Allow me to respond to Kadir Jasin

Then occasional Malaysian Insider columnist Suflan Shamsuddin raised questions about Kadir’s moral authority as a shaper of Malay opinion ‣ Malaysia Today | Opinion Leadership and the Lack Of It

The theatre of conflict widened after Zaid wrote a response on his blog Kalau Hati Dah Busukquestioning Kadir’s own part vis-a-vis Umno assets, and he wrote a letter which Malaysiakini teasingly headlined Hack work from former top editor in which he defended his record and current activities, while questioning Kadir’s performance as a journalist and editor.

Zaid put Kadir’s credibility as an editor and journalist on the line:

What surprised was the complete one-sidedness of his broadside. One would be hard put to recognise that the author is a former Group Editor-in-Chief of the New Straits Times Press… Kadir’s salvo sported no pretence to even-handedness.

and he viewed askance Kadir’s professional performance in stewardship of the NSTP and

the once profitable newspaper group’s decline, which, needless to say, accelerated on Kadir’s watch. …I ask Kadir how did he perform when he was the top man in the largest Bumiputera-owned newspaper group? Did he augment its public stature and its profitability or did he stare a gift horse in the mouth?
‣ MalaysiaKini | Hack work from former top editor

before concluding in sweetly elegant prose about “editorial has-beens like him, content, as ever, to serve the plutocracy that runs the country”.

Kadir Jasin himself has been rather coy about his role in Umno asset shuffling. This is what he wrote in December 2006 for Agenda Daily, an Umno-friendly web site (the Agenda entry is undated, but AKJ’s blog in Bahasa Malaysia on the same subject is dated 8 Dec 2006):

The NSTP … is 43% owned by Media Prima, whose ultimate controlling shareholder is Realmild. Umno is not known to have direct holdings in Realmild. Since it was created in the early 1990s as the vehicle for the management buy-out (MBO) of The NSTP and TV3 by four senior executives of The NSTP, Realmild has been ‘linked’ to the Umno President. (The MBO team started to move out of the group in 1998 following the sacking of Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim as Deputy Prime Minister, and was completed in 2000 when the last member resigned.)
Agenda Daily

Coy is putting it mildly. AKJ himself was one of the Gang of Four, and he was “the last member” that resigned.

And as for the performance of the newspapers, these charts say it all.