Bench chairman Yaacob Md Sam said Sri Ram, who has returned to practise law, was a fit and proper person to be appointed senior deputy public prosecutor (DPP) to handle the cases under Section 376 (3) of the Criminal Procedure Code (CPC).
“We have no doubt Sri Ram is more than qualified to be a senior DPP,” said Yaacob, who sat with Lee Heng Cheong and Che Mohd Ruzima Ghazali.
Yaacob said Section 376 (3) of the CPC was a standalone provision for the attorney- general cum public prosecutor to appoint a qualified person as DPP or senior DPP.
This provision was amended to allow the attorney-general to appoint an experienced DPP to conduct complex cases, he said.
He said a “plain and ordinary grammatical meaning” of the words in Section 376(3) must be construed in harmony with the appointment of a DPP or senior DPP.
It was also immaterial whether the DPP was directly made a senior DPP.
“The appearance of the word senior DPP under Section 378 of the CPC also did not render Sri Ram’s appointment as invalid or void,” he said.
Yaacob said it was clear that in amending Section 376 (3), Parliament had intended to give the attorney-general the power to appoint any fit and proper person to be made senior DPP.
He said the bench also agreed with the High Court that Section 376(3) did not declare that fit and proper DPPs must come from the judicial and legal services or be a public servant.
There was also no basis for Najib and Shafee to claim that Sri Ram’s appointment was in conflict of interest when a practising lawyer was made senior DPP.
He said both also failed to show that the attorney-general had contravened any written law or had acted in bad faith to appoint Sri Ram.
“We concluded the High Court was correct in its findings and there is no need for an appellate court intervention,” he said, adding that no costs were awarded to the attorney-general since it was a public interest case.
Last year, the High Court dismissed a judicial review application by Najib and Shafee to recuse Sri Ram as the senior DPP in their respective cases.
Najib has also filed a criminal motion and gone to the Federal Court to stop Sri Ram from leading the prosecution in four 1MDB-related cases.
Last year, Shafee also failed in his bid to disqualify Sri Ram from prosecuting his RM9.5 million money laundering case .
Shafee represented Najib, and lawyer Harvinderjit Singh appeared for Shafee in the judicial review appeal cases.
Senior federal counsel Shamsul Bolhassan and Liew Horng Bin represented the attorney-general.
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