Kit Siang said the fake posting came on the same day that the prime minister, Najib Razak, had accused news portals of “unhealthy journalism” by pursuing their own agendas, and lumped them together with “keyboard warriors and cybertroopers”.
He said his son had been listed as the 22nd richest person in Malaysia, in company with noted billionaires such as Robert Kuok, Ananda Krishnan, Syed Mokhtar Al-Bukhary, Vincent and Danny Tan, and G Gnanalingam.
The posting was a doctored version of Forbes 2016 Ranking of Malaysia’s 50 Richest, he said, and Guan Eng’s name had been substituted for that of Lim Wee Chai.
“Guan Eng is nowhere in the list, or even among Malaysia’s Richest 500, 5,000 or 50,000 but Umno cybertroopers have no compunction to stoop so low as to doctor the list to malign and defame him and DAP leaders, as they had done in the past,” said Lim, who is DAP parliamentary leader and MP for Gelang Patah. His son is secretary-general of the DAP and chief minister of Penang.
“Has Guan Eng rocketed from a jailbird to become Malaysia’s 22nd richest person worth RM2.87 billion,” he asked, in a reference to Guan Eng’s 18-month jail sentence on a sedition charge in 1998 for criticisms of the government in a case involving statutory rape and Rahim Thamby Chik, then chief minister of Malacca.
Lim also dismissed warnings by the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission yesterday against falsehoods on the Internet, pointing out that no action had been taken either by MCMC or the police against lies posted by Umno cybertroopers against the DAP and its leaders, said Lim.
He accused Najib of closing his eyes to inflammatory and insidious abuses by Umno cybertroopers and said the government was unjustificed in blocking access to The Malaysian Insider.
He urged Najib to uphold the government’s guarantee of no censorship of the Internet and to remove the blocks on the Insider.
“Najib and the Umno-BN government must not arrogate to itself the prerogative of deciding for Malaysians what are truths, half-truths, lies and opinions to form their judgments,” he said. Instead it must uphold constitutional guarantees of freedom of speech, expression and beliefs and the rule of law.
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