Tharman & Singapore's MAS need to explain why the BSI/1 MDB investigation has been handed over to Zeti

The facts are these.

A)Bank Negara has admitted receiving a report from the Monetary Authority Singapore  with regards 1 MDB's account at BSI Bank SIngapore, and admitted that it is a matter for Malaysia's enforcement agencies.

B) BN's admission follows a Sarawak Report story abut the laundering of some USD 860 million via the accounts of BSI Bank's branch in Singapore.Part of the story reads:

The BSI records then detail a series of huge money transfers from Good Star Limited’s account in Zurich (which had directly received $700 million plus $160 million from 1MDB) into this new ADKMIC account over the following two years.

According to the figures, which the bank has submitted to the Singapore authorities, 7 separate payments were made from the Good Star Limited account at RBS Coutts Bank, Zurich into Jho Low’s beneficially owned Abu Dhabi-Kuwait-Malaysia Investment Corporation Account No 6C02395 between 28th June 2011 and 4th September 2013. These payments  totalled USD$528,956.027.05.

The money trail from Good Star led to Jho Low’s account at BSI Singapore.

The BSI Bank Singapore record shows that the account was then closed by Jho Low on 18th February 2014, just a fortnight after the final payment from Good Star Limited.

The Sarawak Report story ha not been denied by anyone so left standing is the allegation that some USD 860 million has been laundered via BSI and then spirited away to destinations unknown .That the MAS is not investigating the issue is puzzling, to say the least.

History of India's Jewish beauty queens:Compare this to Chris Bowen's "the genius of Australian multiculturalism"

NOTE 

This story is one of many similar stories of the world's  races and cultures

mixing in Asia,in ways that have   Australian multiculturalist panting with excitement  at the very thought.

Still, despite this few of us  are in favour of multiculturalism. We know the dangers, often having lived through them. Yet, we have to suffer the pain of hearing  the likes of Chris Bowen, the former minister for immigration ,declaring the "genius of multiculturalism".worse have people like him tell us we simply do not understand the nature of a "true" multicultural society.

Excerpt 

Although Naqi Jahan is considered Jewish because of her Jewish mother, she was raised as a Muslim, as her mother Esther married a popular Muslim film actor of those times, Kumar ne Syed Hasan Ali. Today their son, Haider Ali, is a successful character artist in Bollywood.

History of India's Jewish beauty queens 

In spite of numerical insignificance of Jews in India’s huge population, their women went on to represent country internationally in several beauty pageants 
Dr. Navras Jaat Aafreedi, Tazpit 

Given the fact that Jewish beauty has been celebrated in history, it comes as no surprise that in spite of the numerical insignificance of Jews in India’s huge population, 5,000 in the total Indian population of 1.3 billion, their women went on to represent the country internationally at a number of beauty pageants.

 
In fact, they were the first to do so, as the very first Miss India was Jewish. The first Miss India pageant in 1947 was organized by Femina, a Times of India publication, and the beauty who was crowned as Miss India was a Baghdadi Jewess, Esther Victoria Abraham (1916-2006), who later became popular as a successful film actress with the pseudonym Pramila.


Two decades later, on March 12, 1967, her daughter Naqi Jahan, who was chosen Miss India in the pageant organized by the popular magazine Eve’s Weekly that year, became the first to represent India at the Queen of the Pacific Quest beauty pageant held in Melbourne, Australia.


Although Naqi Jahan is considered Jewish because of her Jewish mother, she was raised as a Muslim, as her mother Esther married a popular Muslim film actor of those times, Kumar ne Syed Hasan Ali. Today their son, Haider Ali, is a successful character artist in Bollywood.
 

The honor of being the first Indian to participate in the Miss World pageant went to Fleur Ezekiel, a member of the Bene Israel community, numerically the largest of the three Jewish communities in India. She represented India in the Miss World pageant of 1959.

 

The mother of the Roy Kapur brothers, Siddharth, Kunal and Aditya, who are making waves in Bollywood today, was Miss India 1972, Salome Aaron. Aaron, a ballroom dancer, later went on to make a career for herself as a film choreographer in Bollywood.

 

Of her three sons she had with her Hindu husband, the eldest, Siddharth, has found great success as the managing director of a film company, which is the joint venture of Disney and UTV in India, while the younger two, Kunal and Aditya, have become successful actors.

 

It is interesting to note that her youngest son, Aditya Roy Kapur, is the second male lead in the only second Indian film to be released simultaneously in India and Israel, "Yeh Jawaani hai Deewani."

 

The author is a scholar of Indo-Judaic Studies, an assistant professor of History at Gautam Buddha University, India

Esther Victoria Abraham, winner of first Miss India pageant in 1947Photo courtesy of Tazpit News Agency

Salome Aaron, Miss India 1972 Photo courtesy of Tazpit News Agency

Fleur Ezekiel, first Indian to participate in Miss World pageant Photo courtesy of Tazpit News Agency

 http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4402232,00.html

Chan-Sukumaran: When Australian "narrative" met Indon reality

While the navel gazing continues the fact is Jokowi, has acted for that which he was elected. As he put it again yesterday: 

"Ini kedaulatan hukum kita. Saya tidak akan mengulang-ulang lagi. Jangan ditanya itu-itu lagi," 

That he is Megawati' s man is besides the point, and Australia should not assume that the Indon voter was or is ignorant of that fact.

Malaysian agencies saw all this coming even before the Indonesian election was held,and certainly before Jokowi was elected, They understood that the mood on the ground was for a president who would, unlike SBY, stand up to all Indonesia's neighbours,not concede anything, and rather assert Indonesia 

Australia and, one would presume Daft (otherwise known as the Department of Foreign Affairs And Trade) chose instead to "re-imagine" Australian-Indon relations ,and then presumed  that the Indons would  somehow conform with its "narrative".

The Australian reaction is akin to that of a child that has been denied. South l East Asian leaders have over the years learnt to deal with it ,first by letting the child rant and rave,and then wait for it to come back as it nothing happened. 

END 

Chan-Sukumaran : Australia berates Indonesia rather than accept the reality of SEA politics.-Even Kuan Yew paid homage to Rosmah

When Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak became prime minister the late Lee Kuan Yew paid his neighbour a courtesy call, his first in many years.Duringn that trip he specifically called on Najib's wife Rosmah Mansor,for in his words:

Lee said he called on Rosmah because he had been told that she and her
husband worked as a team and it was necessary for him to understand both
members of the team.

Australia's leadership on the other hand will do no such thing.Instead of accepting the reality of the Indonesian politics, Megawati Sukarnoputri is ignored, despite the fact that we now have a female foreign minister (admittedly not too bright) who could have easily requested to meet Megawati.

Instead, views of this sort of are thrown about,in some eccentric notion that it will win over Indonesia's leadership: 

Indonesian President Widodo under corrupt thumb of Megawati

Date

April 27, 2015 - 9:50PM

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Peter Hartcher

Sydney Morning Herald political and international editor

View more articles from Peter Hartcher

Despite worldwide appeals for clemency for the Bali nine, President Widodo may not stop the executions to please his party and public.

Indonesia's president is in a position of weakness. Pathetic weakness.

Joko Widodo, who took power just six months ago with stratospheric approval ratings, should have been feted when he appeared before his party's national congress earlier this month.

Instead, he was humiliated. As he sat in the front row, his party's chairperson, Megawati Soekarnoputri, harangued him from the lectern. She said that he owed the presidency to her. She told him to do as he's told:

Dial-a-leader: Widodo is under his party leader's thumb.Photo: Bloomberg

"It goes without saying that the president and vice president must toe the party line," said Megawati, herself a former president and the daughter of Indonesia's late founder, Soekarno.

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"As the 'extended hands' of the party, you are its functionaries. If you do not want to be called party functionaries, just get out!"

Megawati's speech won applause described by the Indonesian media as thunderous. And the president's speech, which he had with him, ready to be delivered?

It was not heard. Jokowi, the nickname by which he's universally known, was denied the opportunity to speak to his party congress. It was, in all, a brutal and calculated putdown.

He meekly accepted this public humiliation. When reporters asked his response to Megawati's tirade, he replied: "It was very good." It was abject. But she is the power behind his throne. He now finds that he has no dignity serving her, yet he cannot rule without her.

The soaring hopes that Indonesia's people had invested in Jokowi were dashed in the first few months of his presidency.

One of the reasons for the great popularity of the former furniture manufacturer was his unquestioned probity.

In his previous post as governor of Jakarta, he had impressed the people by living in an unpretentious house, rejecting the muscular cavalcade of police vehicles that he was entitled to, and giving every appearance of meaning it when he promised to campaign against corruption, the scourge of Indonesian society.

He was Mr Clean in a land where power is dirty, and Indonesians crave clean government.

So imagine the dismay when one of Jokowi's earliest acts was to launch an assault against Indonesia's well-regarded Corruption Eradication Commission, known by its Indonesian acronym KPK.

The KPK is Indonesia's most trusted institution. It has fearlessly pursued the powerful and brought down hundreds of politicians, officials, generals and police chiefs.

Since it started work in 2003, Indonesia's corruption rating improved from less than 2 points out of a possible 100 to a score of 34 last year, according to Transparency International. Now Jokowi has put Indonesia's progress in doubt.

Jokowi named as the new national police chief a man the KPK had marked as under investigation for corruption. The nominee, Budi Gunawan​, is considered suspiciously well off. This appointment was the single biggest blunder Jokowi could have made. It set off an open war between the police and the KPK. The police arrested the head of the KPK on spurious charges to make a point – it was coming after the KPK.

Jokowi, after weeks of dithering, suspended the nomination but named an interim police chief who is just as dubious. Why did Jokowi make such a bad choice? Was Mr Clean really Mr Dirty? According to Indonesian media, it was at the behest of Megawati. Gunawan had once served as her aide.

So Mr Clean was merely Mr Weak. This was precisely the charge his rival for the presidency, Prabowo Subianto​, made against him in last year's election campaign – Jokowi would be Megawati's puppet. And so it has proved. Now that his approval rating is negative, he is even more abjectly under her power.

Jokowi campaigned on the need to be tough on drug offenders. He called for the restoration of the death penalty, suspended by his predecessor. And Megawati is now pressing him hard on the issue. As part of his ritual humiliation at the party conference, she goaded him publicly on the issue:

"Megawati said to him at the party congress, 'Why haven't the executions been carried out already – you aren't buckling to foreign pressure, are you?'" says Greg Fealy, a leading ANU scholar of Indonesia.

"The politics is that death penalty is extremely popular in Indonesia, Jokowi is slipping in the polls, he's desperate to turn it around, and of the available issues this is the most readily available on which he's looking strong, according to most Indonesians," says Fealy.

Indonesia is a country insecure about itself in the world, and its politicians prey on this to find popular favour. The Indonesian revival of the death penalty for drug offenders partly responds to popular clamour to control drug abuse. But it also plays to politicians wanting to demonstrate a faux defiance of world powers.

For instance, the head of the armed forces, Moeldoko, said that the countries with citizens on Indonesia's death row might try to intervene, implying that Australia or France might mount an SAS raid on Indonesia to break their citizens out of jail. "It's too stupid for words," observes Fealy, "but it went down very well" with the public.

Now you know why the Indonesian authorities marshalled such a ludicrously overblown array of force, hundreds of commandos and four naval warships, to transport the handcuffed Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran from one island to another.

A pathetically weak leader, pandering to a national pathology of perceived Indonesian weakness, appears to have decided irrevocably to put humanity and judicial rigour aside and to execute Chan and Sukumaran and the other prisoners.

Because only a pathetically weak leader would execute the powerless to prove his strength.

Peter Hartcher is the international editor.

On this ANZAC Day- A renewed call to honour the sacrifice of the AIF in Malaya

NOTE 

This 2007 op-ed by Alan Ramsey says it quite well,and I need  not add anything except to say 

that remembering those who died  defending Malaya is important for the sake of history, and to address 

ignorance  such as this: Anzac Day a jarring experience for migrant Australians

Savaged in battle, blotted from history

Alan Ramsey
April 21, 2007

Varley and those Australians who survived the Malayan campaign have always felt the 8th Division's short, brutal war is largely ignored because they ended up POWs on the orders of a British general in Singapore. And when John Howard's pet project of a new $9 million Australian war memorial on the corner of London's Hyde Park was opened by the Queen in November 2003, Malaya was missing from the named list of 47 Australian battle sites chosen from two world wars.Jack Varley is now in his 87th year. He was 19 when he enlisted in the army in July 1940 and 20 when he was shipped to Singapore with the 8th Division's 2/19th Battalion in 1941. He was 21 when cited for a Military Cross for "conspicuous gallantry in complete disregard for his personal safety" during fierce fighting against invading Japanese troops on the Malay peninsula in January 1942.

Varley was still 21 when his war ended.

The British capitulation in Singapore on February 15, 1942 delivered 130,000 troops, including 15,000 Australians, into Japanese prisoner-of-war camps. Jack Varley, a junior lieutenant, and his father, Lieutenant-Colonel Arthur Varley, a World War I winner of two Military Crosses on the Somme, were among them. The Malay campaign had lasted just 70 days as Japanese forces swept 1000 kilometres down the Malay peninsula into Singapore. Australian casualties totalled nearly 3100, including 1789 dead, according to the official war history.

Jack Varley survived 3½ years in Singapore's Changi prison and on the infamous Thai-Burma railway. His father did not. Neither did one in every three of the more than 21,500 Australian soldiers captured by the Japanese in all theatres of the Pacific war. Of these, 7777 died in captivity, including 123 officers, while 13,872 survived. Of the dead, 27 were executed for attempted escape, 193 were executed for "other reasons" and "375 others were believed to have been executed".

Volume four - The Japanese Thrust - of the Australian official war history records: "By comparison, of 7116 Australian soldiers who were prisoners of Germany and Italy only 242 died in captivity. Australian soldiers who escaped from … German or Italian camps numbered 582. Only about eight of the Australian soldiers captured in Malaya succeeded in escaping, evidence partly of the ruthless treatment of recaptured men."

All this is sombre background to this story.

Jack Varley now lives in Queensland. He wrote to me a few weeks ago of the 90th birthday of one of his fellow POWs ("There must be more good in rice than we first thought!"). Then he got to the point: "We belonged to one of the most distinguished and yet unrecognised AIF battalions in World War II. All battalions had heavy battle casualties and [the 2/19th was among] those with the most. But ask the public or the education [system] about the AIF in Malaya and [all] you will be told is they became POWs and built a railway line for the Japs."

Di Elliott, of Evatt, ACT, who lost an 8th Division relative in the notorious Sandakan POW camp in North Borneo, wrote in part to the then veterans' affairs minister, Danna Vale, in June, 2004: "After waiting for a reply for eight months, I am not satisified with your explanation. Irrespective of what process was taken on the choice of battle sites, I and many others still find the omission of Malaya offensive to the men of the 8th Division AIF. Nothing will ever convince me, or others, that the omission is anything short of yet another slur on the history of the 8th Division who, for some reason, are seen by today's historians as nothing more than 'those who became prisoners of war'."

Vale's departmental adviser replied, in part, 2½ months later: "The architect sought to capture the broad events covering two world wars for present and future generations. The focus for veterans is to be found in the 24,000 names of home towns where the separations, losses and aftermath were endured by whole communities. I trust you can accept that the breadth of scope of the design of this memorial prevents it meeting the focus you seek. Thank you for again raising your concerns."

Elliott said this week: "How wrong they are. One word - Malaya - would have done nicely, thank you."