Lembaga Lebuhraya Malaysia (LLM) awarded the Kinara-Damansara Expressway (Kidex Skyway) to a company where one of it’s ( LLM) directors has a substantial shareholding and is a director.

Is this right? Can this be done?  Did the director declare his interest to LLM? Did he (the director) participate in the award? Is it now public service for personal profit? Is this corruption? Is this not insider trading? Business sense is the rakyat’s loss?

These are the questions Lembaga Lebuhraya Malaysia needs to answer. The rakyat want to know, have you kept your part of the Public Services Charter or do you stand by Malaysia Boleh? Anything goes.

We the rakyat want to know, is this corruption/insider trading - not just in terms of money but the wider sense - acceptable in a public corporate body.

What is the purpose of Lembaga Lebuhraya Malaysia and what is the public duty of its director? Do you sit on the board to enrich yourself and profit from the information you as a director have gained? Whose interest do the directors protect? When the director has an interest is it not ‘conflict of interest’?

Where is the public service - service to the people? Is it not service? Sure, you were paid director’s fees, then why take a project wherein your company profits? Are you building the project for free! Is that too much to ask? Never mind whether the highway project is toll free. If you are doing that, then it would be a public service.  

Is the Kidex Skyway a toll-free highway or was it planned as one when the award was given to the Lembaga Lebuhraya Malaysia director’s company.

We all know the spirit of voluntarism is dead. Now is pubic service dead, too?

The good men and women who serve the nation without enriching themselves should be saluted. They do not sell of their post but defend it till death. Can we say the same about the LLM director?

It is now a free-for-all, go ahead hold a public office and appointment and enrich yourself with the information gained while holding a public office.

Then when the day finally comes, and thereafter, accountability and integrity will be judged in the rakyat’s court.

SELVE SUGUMARAN PERUMAL is vice-chairperson of the NGO Say No To Kidex.