Basic principles relevant to the actions of the disciplinary board

By Tengku Razaleigh

1) Eligibility to hold office is a right of membership

The disciplinary board barred Dato’ Seri Mohd Ali Rustam from elections without suspending him from the Party. However I do not see how they may bar him from contesting so long as he remains a member of the Party. The Societies Act defines the “eligibility to hold office in the committee or governing body of the society,” along with the right to vote, as a constitutional right of every member. The disciplinary board can remove certain privileges but not rights provided by the Constitution. Umno’s constitution cannot be interpreted contrary to the Societies Act.

So long as Mohd Ali remains a member, it is just as wrong to deprive him of his candidacy as to deprive him of his right to vote.

Datuk Norza, who is being investigated by the MACC, is still a candidate. What holds for Norza holds for Mohd Ali too. Members may not be barred from contesting.

Mohd Ali can appeal to the Registrar of Societies to put a stop to the Elections if he is unlawfully deprived of his eligibility for office. At the very least, his appeal against his punishment needs to be heard before the party elections commence next week.

2) Elections to be legitimate, must be fair

Bribery always involves at least two parties. The disciplinary board has found that Mohd Ali was involved in political bribery through his agents. However has the board also investigated every member alleged to have received those bribes?

Money is often passed out for further distribution. Has the board traced the entire trail of inducements, monetary or in kind, identified every culpable participant, and suspended his membership? If not, the tainted votes of those participants will taint the entire party elections. Again, the properly resourced and properly independent agency to do this is the MACC, not the disciplinary board.

So long as no thorough investigation by an independent agency has been conducted, there remains a real likelihood that the party elections will be tainted by corruption, and hence illegitimate.

3) Corruption is a criminal matter

The MACC was properly instituted by an Umno-led government. It was not designed to used only against the Opposition and members of the public.

The disciplinary board has gathered enough evidence of Dato’ Seri Mohd Ali Rustam, Mr Khairy Jamaluddin, and eight other individuals being involved in “money politics” to mete out punishments ranging from suspensions to a warning.

But money politics is nothing but a euphemism for political bribery, and political bribery is a crime covered by the Penal Code. If you know of a crime but do not report it, you become an accomplice to the crime.

Similarly, if the Disciplinary Board has found Mohd Ali guilty of bribery, direct or indirect, it is legally required to report him and his agents to the MACC and and to hand over all the evidence it has collected to the MACC and to the Registrar of Societies immediately. If the Board fails to report and submit all the evidence of corruption it has found, it risks making Umno, as a party, accomplice to corruption, in which case the Registrar of Societies is required to act against it.

The disciplinary board is not a replacement for the Courts of Law. Its job is to investigate and punish violations of Umno’s Code of Ethics. If in the process it comes upon legal violations, it must report them. In other words, the board is there to investigate ethics violations and not to provide Umno a managed alternative to legal justice.

I don’t recall Parliament having passed an Act to exempt Umno from the laws of the land. It’s not as if there is a misdemeanour of “money politics” for Umno, and “corrupt practices” for everyone else.

Corruption is a cancer eating through the bones of our society. It is a crime whose victims are the unseen people it steals from, the fair processes it subverts and the institutions it destroys. It takes from the weak to give to the strong. It perverts justice, erodes trust and chokes idealism. It is destroying Malaysia. If Umno closes an eye to it, Umno makes itself the enemy of the Malays, their corruptor rather than their champion. There is no chance of our tackling this pestilence if our actions suggest that corruption is ok for some people some of the time.

Umno’s leadership should be mindful of the fact that the party of Merdeka is now almost universally viewed as corrupt beyond redemption. Yet they talk of reform and transparency, and by their actions promise “not under their watch.”