In a press statement reacting to a Wall Street Journal report that Irwan would replace Zeti Akhtar Aziz, Ong said:
“I want to raise some concerns regarding Irwan’s role in the multi-billion ringgit debts of Pembinaan PFI Sdn Bhd, a 99 percent Finance Ministry-owned company. Pembinaan PFI first rose to prominence when the 2013 Auditor-General’s Report showed that it had accumulated liabilities of close to RM28 billion at financial year end 2012, putting it only behind Petronas and Khazanah among government-owned entities.
“Irwan was appointed to the board of Pembinaan PFI in 2012 when he was the deputy secretary in charge of policy in the Finance Ministry. After he was promoted to secretary-general of the ministry, Irwan remained as a director of Pembinaan PFI.
“The Auditor-General’s report prompted a Parliamentary Accounts Committee (PAC) investigation into Pembinaan PFI. The PAC report was released in March 2015, a copy of which can be downloaded from Parliament’s website.
“The testimony of the witnesses, including Irwan, clearly showed the spending incurred by Pembinaan PFI is nothing more than a creative way to hide development expenditure from the official budget and, in doing so, artificially keep Malaysia’s debt to GDP ratio at below the 55 percent mark.
“Pembinaan PFI is not funding expenditure through private finance initiatives (which its name implies) since there is no private money involved in these projects.
“Indeed, during the PAC meeting, Irwan admitted as much when he said the following to the chairperson of the PAC: ‘Your understanding of it is very clear – that you know this is off-budget. It doesn’t come in to the government; so that’s why you know our debt level and rating and everything we can maintain.’”
Ong said he was concerned that Irwan might “also rely on creative accounting for other sensitive economic data such as Bank Negara’s official reserves.”
“He will then be painting an unrealistically positive account of the Malaysian economy via the central bank’s economic reports and fail to flag areas of concern such as the possibility of a growing fiscal deficit,” he added.
Ong recalled that when asked by The Edge TV on the specific issue of Pembinaan PFI, Irwan gave an allegedly misleading answer. “He likened the projects under Pembinaan PFI with the MRT project, stating that the payback period was over a very long horizon when, in actual fact, most of the projects under Pembinaan PFI are not capable of revenue generation.”