Illicit flow of funds not linked to Pandora Papers, says Najib

PETALING JAYA: The illicit outflow of funds from the country is not related to the Pandora Papers, says Datuk Seri Najib Razak.

The former prime minister said that DAP had been wrongly linking a report by Global Financial Integrity (GFI) about the illegal outflow of funds by import and export companies and multinational companies to evade taxes, to the Pandora Papers.

He also questioned DAP secretary-general Lim Guan Eng for not focusing on the issue of trade mispricing while Lim was the finance minister.

"Why did Pakatan Harapan abolish the Goods and Service Tax (GST) that was capable of controlling trade mispricing?

"The funniest thing is that although DAP had played on the issue of the GFI report and the outflow of illicit money worth more than RM100bil in trade mispricing since 2011, Lim Guan Eng or the Pakatan Harapan had said nothing about this during their 22 months in the government," he said on Facebook on Sunday (Oct 17).

Najib was responding to Lim’s post urging Bank Negara Malaysia and the Finance Ministry to investigate the illicit outflow of RM138.66bil from the country from 2006 to 2015, which he said was allegedly linked to the Pandora Papers.

The Pandora Papers are a data leak involving 2.94 terabytes of data which cited the opening of offshore accounts involving former and current government and political leaders around the world, including Malaysia.