Puad calls on Bar Council to hold walk to seek justice for Najib

PETALING JAYA: The Bar Council should also hold a protest walk to seek justice for Datuk Seri Najib Razak, says Umno supreme council member Datuk Dr Mohd Puad Zarkashi.

"Is the Bar Council following in the footsteps of Datuk Ambiga Sreenevasan?

"Ambiga, the former Bar Council president, organised the ‘Walk for Judicial Independence’ this Friday (June 17) in Kuala Lumpur.

"So, is it wrong for the Bar Council to also hold a protest walk to seek that Najib be given a fair trial?" he said in a Facebook post on Thursday (June 16).

Puad questioned the Bar Council for not speaking out against Court of Appeal judge Datuk Mohd Nazlan Mohd Ghazali and only reacting when criticised over its silence and reiterated his call that a special tribunal be set up to probe the allegations against Mohd Nazlan.

On May 27, the Malaysian Bar voted to hold a peaceful protest to uphold judicial independence and to also condemn a Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission (MACC) investigation against Mohd Nazlan.

The decision to hold the peaceful protest comes after an overwhelming majority of the lawyers agreed to the gathering and walk during the Bar's recent extraordinary general meeting.

The MACC investigations followed claims by blogger Raja Petra Kamaruddin that there were funds transferred to Mohd Nazlan's account during his time as the group general counsel and company secretary of Maybank.

Mohd Nazlan was the judge who convicted Najib over the misappropriation of RM42mil of SRC International Sdn Bhd funds.

He lodged a police report against Raja Petra on April 21, denying the accusations, which he said were malicious, baseless and aimed at tarnishing his credibility as a judge.

On Wednesday (June 15), Bar Council president Karen Cheah rebuffed Puad's claims that the council was being selective in defending issues and his calls for the setting up of a special tribunal.

She said it was erroneous of Puad to have expected the Bar Council to speak out against something which even Najib's lawyers had been unaware of previously.

"It is misconceived to expect the Bar Council to ask for Nazlan’s recusal back then, when even legal counsel for the former prime minister claims he was only made aware of such developments recently,” she added.

Cheah also said that calls for the setting up of a special tribunal to probe the claims against Mohd Nazlan were “pre-mature and misconceived”.

She said Najib's defence had submitted an application to introduce new evidence related to the SRC case, which was before the courts.

"We should therefore trust the court to deal with it.

"The public needs to know that since there is a pending application and the court will be hearing the case, any call to establish a tribunal to deal with this very same issue of conflict of interest, at this point in time, is clearly premature and misconceived," she said.

Cheah denied the council was selective in defending issues and has remained apolitical in upholding the rule of law for the good of the nation.