One reason generally being offered as to why Musa Aman is being touted as the front runner for Governor of Sabah is that it is ‘necessary for a Muslim’ to be appointed as the main representative for the once majority Christian state.

Politically, for the federal government this may be the case (certainly it is not constitutionally required). If so, why choose the most embarrassing Muslim one could possibly find to fulfil that role, just at a time when Sabah’s present government is sinking under the weight of its own current corruption scandals?

Musa Aman is a fellow whose record fills everyone, bar his cronies and hangers-on, with utter disgust throughout the state. Must he be inflicted on Sabah as a form of humiliation much as Taib Mahmud was inflicted on Sarawak?

So much for the touted campaign against corruption to entice foreign investment in Malaysia by the ‘reformist’ present government.

Musa Aman’s status and candidacy relies on the huge sums of money he stole from the wealthy state when he controlled it on behalf of UMNO, whilst at the same time condemning its population to the bottom of the poverty league table in Malaysia.

Everybody knows it.

Exposed, Charged…. then Let Off After A Crony Coup!

Sarawak Report spilled the beans on Musa Aman back in 2012/2013 some time after his agent Michael Chia was picked up in Hong Kong with a suitcase of dollars (worth RM40m) which he was trying to smuggle through customs…. just how (not) to handle a ‘legitimate political donation’, which is what Musa’s excuse turned out to be.

The Hong Kong anti-corruption authorities gave up on the case after Malaysia’s own corrupted UMNO hierarchy failed to cooperate and a damning MACC investigation was closed down, which Musa and his supporters (including his relative the then AG Gani Paital) sought to describe as an exoneration.  It wasn’t.

Using data and documentation that Musa even whilst chief minister never attempted to deny, Sarawak Report later exposed how this suitcase of cash was just part of a huge off-shore money laundering operation run by Musa and his lawyer through the help of the same Michael Chia to process tens of millions of dollars in timber kickbacks, which he funnelled into his own Swiss bank accounts and used to pay for family ‘essentials’ such as Australian homes and educations for his offspring.

Once again the bleated excuse was that these were merely ‘political donations’ (from the timber companies he had handed licenses to) and were meant for his party not him, even though he had failed to pass them to his party let alone declare them.

This appears to be his continuing position on the subject, much as Najib Razak falls back on dodgy (and non-existent) Saudi ‘political donations’ to explain his own corrupted thefts from federal coffers.

In the face of non-cooperation from Malaysia, the Swiss authorities were likewise forced to close down their investigations into the millions that had wended their way from Chia’s accounts and those of Christopher Barnes into the UBS dollar bank account owned by Musa in Zurich.

However, a guilty conscience speaks. When the Najib government fell, thanks to SR’s separate exposes, Musa took the first plane out, outclassing Najib who left it too late to run to the airport.

Musa had escaped to London in anticipation of the negative result which saw him turfed out of office in Sabah also, and disappeared for days. He was eventually lured back by the Mahathir government (following the issuing of a Red Notice).

At this point Musa went into full emergency illness mode, pleading extreme sickness and spending months in hospital as prosecutors duly went about their task of garnering the evidence that had set him into such a panic after his loss of protective office.

Remember, honest politicians who lose elections merely make a gracious speech and retire to other pursuits, after being duly thanked for their efforts in the public arena.

The upshot of the investigations was a devastating indictment of the former UMNO treasurer cum forestry head cum chief minister. No less than 46 charges were brought against him for accepting tens of millions in timber kickbacks, money laundering and criminal breach of trust in office.

Deny, then Change of Story and Excuse!

The case against Musa was solid indeed. Former collaborators had delivered their witness statements and the money trails were clear. Musa, whose brother was Najib’s foreign minister, had sought originally to deny he had anything to do with the young Michael Chia who had been picked up trying to smuggle RM40 million in SG$10,000 notes out of Hong Kong in advance of the 2008 elections.

Yet, by 2012 Sarawak Report had collected a mass of leaked evidence that showed how Chia had been funding Musa’s family via his company accounts and was passing on huge sums of money to Musa’s own accounts and those of Musa’s lawyer Christopher Barnes – both these men eventually gave witness statements to Malaysian prosecutors.

Musa retorted in the media claiming first that SR’s data was ‘forged’, only to be undermined by court cases in which one of the banks concerned, UBS, submitted evidence that exactly matched the material we had published!

SR then published MACC and ICAC (HK Independent Commission Against Corruption) material that showed the money flows from timber barons who received licences in Sabah through Michael Chia into Musa’s Swiss accounts.

That was 12 years ago and Musa Aman has never sought to take legal action to deny these allegations which everyone in Sabah is now well aware of:

Indeed the sordid story was not hard to unravel. Young Michael Chia (who died of lung cancer over the past few days) was Musa’s equivalent of Jho Low to Najib.  Musa called the youth an ‘adoptive son’ in his private circles and knew him only too well as his fixer for kickbacks from timber barons seeking permits to log out the remaining virgin jungle in the state.

Indeed, Musa had done business which Chia’s own Dad before him, offering him an inexplicable monopoly on the logging barge business – inexplicable that is unless financial benefits flowed back to Musa and his UMNO party.

Just like Jho Low, Chia became known for his brat pack existence purchasing strings of fast cars and living the high life without any explicable reason for his wealth …. until his connections to Musa became apparent.

Protected by Najib himself, his brother the foreign minister (Anifah Aman was one of the first to receive timber concessions when Musa gained control of Yayasan Sabah) and also by the then AG Gain Patail (another relative) Musa was of course let off the original scandal involving Chia’s suitcase of cash in Hong Kong.

The UMNO hierarchy tellingly didn’t try to deny the money or even Chia’s connections to Musa, they merely opined that the money had been intended for ‘party political purposes’ and was merely a ‘donation’ and so therefore ‘legitimate’.

All of this was laughably untrue in that legitimate multi-million ringgit donations are not secretively transferred by suitcase through borders by young runners and then denied before being admitted to. The origin of this money was moreover never declared – even Najib was later able to produce a forged letter sent to his bank to attempt to explain his own ‘donations’!

Yet, the charges were shamefully dropped and Musa excused by UMNO prosecutors.

And again in 2020, UMNO having contrived itself back into office through a backdoor coup, one of the first things it did was to again drop all the charges drawn up based on solid evidence against their ally Musa in Sabah!  Not because the evidence did not hold water, but because politically Musa’s allies chose not to prosecute him – they preferred to let him keep his piles of kickback money stolen from the state.

This was one of the most shameful actions of the Muhiyddin administration as all agreed, allowing a renowned crook almost on the scale of Najib himself to remain at large and unpunished with his stolen cash intact. It heaped shame on Sabah in the same way that the continuing tenure of the utterly corrupted Taib as TYT in Sarawak shamed that state as well.

UMNO’s Crooks

This was a classic case of UMNO corruption. Musa had begun life as a party apparatchik in the scheme to capture Sabah from its native parties – he held the position of Treasurer. When UMNO snatched power in 1993 by bribing the state’s notorious ‘frogs’ (having lost the actual election) Musa was parachuted in as Chief Executive of Yayasan Sabah to make sure the party immediately had its hands on the state’s rich timber resources.

He set about milking them, not just for UMNO but for himself, as the 46 charges eventually laid against him laid out in detail. What he and UMNO failed to do in all those intervening decades was to take care of the dirt poor native people of the state over whom they had seized power through their corrupt practices.

When he took office eventually as Chief Minister, Musa ensured his continuing control over those resources by making himself chairman of Yayasan Sabah – the final arbiter of who should get licenses and who should not.

In a pattern of behaviour that is strikingly the same as the way Najib operated through Jho Low, the Forest Manager, Mohd Daud Tampokong, was instructed to hand out those licenses to whom Musa’s intermediary Michael Chia instructed him to do so. These were the timber barons who were paying Chia kickbacks, which then in large part filtered back to Musa.

Musa protested SR’s revelation of this fact, but never explained how it was that Mr Tampokong received SG$85,000 payment from one of Chia’s BVI accounts in 2006 for example, named Zenique Investments. Zenique Investments was also part of the network of accounts funding Musa’s own Swiss bank account with UBS and was itself receiving money from two major Sabah timber tycoons Freddie and Andrew Lim.

All of this remains known and effectively uncontested – evidence that can only raise utter disgust over the entrenched corruption of this man, who incidentally appeared to have miraculously regained his health once his allies managed to regain office and disgracefully drop all the charges against him.

When they had the opportunity once more, the Malaysian people voted out these self-appointed gangsters at the last election. They voted for a government that had platformed on an anti-corruption agenda that has been much touted by its leadership ever since.

Yet, Sabah has remained caught under the same coalition of ‘frog-buying’ political leaders, seemingly intent on stripping as many assets from the state – including issuing mining licences to compliant assemblymen, according to just the latest scandal – meaning that the duty of the ‘reforming’ federal government HAS to be to appoint a person of integrity to head the state.

To the contrary, all the money on tomorrow’s appointment has been placed seemingly on none other than this shameless and shameful individual, Musa Aman, who brings embarrassment on all around him.

This on top of apparently supporting a chief minister who is at this very moment seeking to write off damning evidence of graft as ‘AI generated’, whilst his deputy chief minister wallows caught red-handed in a grotesque carbon credit scam and the Sabah Development Bank lies exposed as another version of 1MDB, looted through bogus investments.

The ‘reforming Madani’ government is, in other words, widely expected to make Musa Aman governor of the State of Sabah as part of a self-centred political manoeuvre to prevent the more popular local parties who actually won the support of the electorate from gaining office.

Such a move would condemn Sabah to sink status.  A state where no-one could invest apart from gangster resource grabbers from lawless regimes, its governor being tainted as a fantastically corrupted crook, just as Sarawak suffered thanks again to selfishness and power play by federal Malaysia.

Very few in Sabah will thank West Malaysia for imposing such a choice and that brings consequences.

A selection of Sarawak Report’s original exposes of the proposed next Governor of Sabah can be accessed from the links below:

https://www.sarawakreport.org/2012/04/malaysian-foreign-minister-named-in-macc-investigation-into-sabah-timber-corruption-national-expose/

https://www.sarawakreport.org/2012/04/sabahs-smoking-gun-bank-statements-show-that-musa-amans-sons-accessed-dirty-money-national-exclusive/

https://sarawakreport.org/2012/04/no-business-association-whatsoever-with-an-individual-named-michael-chia-we-release-further-documents/

https://sarawakreport.org/2012/04/hold-on-trust-for-aman-more-devastating-evidence-from-the-icac-investigation/

https://sarawakreport.org/2012/04/barging-into-profit-the-chia-family-sue-yayasan-sabah-for-rm84-4million-in-monopoly-row/

https://sarawakreport.org/2012/06/nailed-musas-lies-are-countered-by-swiss-ubs-bank-in-court-evidence/

https://www.sarawakreport.org/2012/10/musas-secret-donors-we-blow-the-whistle-on-umnos-sabah-kickbacks/

https://www.sarawakreport.org/2012/10/no-element-of-corruption-bns-ridiculous-claim/

https://www.sarawakreport.org/2012/07/hsbcs-money-laundering-scandal-time-to-probe-the-musa-connection/

https://www.sarawakreport.org/2012/11/monster-gift-michael-chia-handed-huge-hummer-car-to-friend-nazri-exclusive-expose/