Addressing a social media post about Accio CEO Cher Han Lau, Rafizi refuted Cher’s claim that Accio was involved. He said Padu was completely developed by civil servants without the involvement of third parties.

“I am aware of a social media post by BFM89.9 radio station on Cher, who claims that his company was involved in the development of Padu.

“After checking with the team from the statistics department (DoSM), I can confirm that Cher’s allegations are untrue,” Bernama reported him as saying in a statement.

Rafizi said the Padu analytics team had invited Cher only in the capacity of upskilling in data science, based on his development ability in big data and machine learning.

“Padu’s development and the collection or cleaning of its data has not involved him or anyone from his company,” he said.

Launched on Jan 2, Padu contains the profiles of citizens and permanent residents living in Malaysia to help the government implement policies in a targeted manner.

It was jointly developed using the internal expertise of the economy ministry, DoSM, and the Malaysian Administrative Modernisation and Management Planning Unit, in collaboration with various data provider agencies.