‘It is a collective decision by NSC’

Datuk Seri Mohamed Azmin Ali said the brighter economic prospect was attributable to rising global demand, increased public and private sector spending, as well as continued policy support.

THE International Trade and Industry Ministry (Miti) does not independently decide which sectors can operate during lockdowns, says Datuk Seri Azmin Ali (pic).

He said all decisions were collectively made by the National Security Council (NSC).

“As a precursor before a decision is made, each ministry will first present its respective positive and negative lists before the council.

“After taking into account the views of all sectors, whether it is the health or economy sector, the NSC will decide what sectors should be in the positive or negative list.

“The role of my ministry is only to coordinate the sectors in the positive list so that they are allowed to operate because presently, we have a one-stop system to coordinate the sectors and sub-sectors that are allowed to operate as a result of the decision by the NSC,” he said.

Azmin was explaining the issue after Opposition MPs chided the ministry for allowing factories to operate and in turn causing the clusters from the manufacturing sector to aggravate the Covid-19 crisis.

He was interjected by Gobind Singh Deo (PH-Puchong) and Khaled Abd Samad (PH-Shah Alam) when he held up a presentation board to illustrate Health director- general Tan Sri Dr Noor Hisham Abdullah’s explanation on how many cases actually originated from clusters and how many were sporadic.

Livid at being heckled, Azmin sternly said: “Don’t be silly, don’t be stupid, you don’t even understand such a simple thing.”

He continued to say that the statement by Dr Noor Hisham noted that 69% of Covid-19 cases were sporadic while the remaining 31% were from clusters.

“From June 1 to July 23, data from the Health Ministry stated that cases from factories stood at 35,968 or only 8.8% out of the overall 408,134 cases,” he said.

Azmin pulled out the statistics to counter the earlier figures cited by Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim (PH-Port Dickson) where the latter also cited Dr Noor Hisham’s numbers that 80% of the workplace clusters in Selangor came from factories.