PETALING JAYA: Perikatan Nasional chairman Tan Sri Muhyiddin Yassin has remained undaunted at the prospect of being investigated over the alleged RM600bil expenditure in government funds during his time as prime minister.
The former prime minister claimed that he had never embezzled or misused funds meant to help the people and that even if he did, investigations would have started a long time ago.
"Such a large sum of funds would definitely not have gone unnoticed by the National Audit Department (JAN) who audits government spending annually of which the report is then presented by the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) in Parliament.
"It's very unlikely that both JAN and PAC somehow overlooked such a large amount.
"Bank Negara would also definitely have been alerted if my bank account were to suddenly receive such a large sum of money as some have claimed," he said in a Facebook post Monday (Dec 5).
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Muhyiddin added that he only knew of the eight Economic Stimulus Packages (ESP) worth RM530bil that was implemented during the Covid-19 lockdowns that he claimed mostly consisted of non-fiscal initiatives that did not involve government expenditure.
"There were initiatives like i-Lestari, i-Sinar and i-Citra programmes that allowed people to withdraw their Employees Provident Fund (EPF) worth RM145bil, and a reduction in EPF payments worth RM10bil.
"There was also a moratorium on bank loan payments for both individuals and companies worth RM180bil and government guarantee for companies’ loans worth RM80bil, among many others.
"Only around RM83bil was actually spent by the government which included expenses like vaccine purchases worth RM5bil and various forms of direct cash assistance for the people such as wage subsidies worth RM20.92bil along with many other welfare programmes, according to the Finance Minister's statement on June 29, 2021," he said.
He also claimed that the allegations only came to light recently as a way to silence opposition against the new unity government.
"Don't keep on pointing fingers at others with nonsense accusations just to cover up the weakness of the current government.
"You’ve become the government so act like the government instead of playing all these political moves because the people are only interested in what the government has planned for them," he said.
Calls for an official investigation into the stimulus spending started after suspicion arose about the alleged well-funded campaign Perikatan during the 15th General Election.
Umno information chief Isham Jalil, Amanah's mobilisation director Mohd Sany Hamzan and Youth vice-chief Ammar Atan as well as the Muslim Consumers Association of Malaysia (PPIM) had called for a Royal Commission of Inquiry (RCI) to investigate the issue.
