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1MDB and Deloitte may have breached the Companies Act 1965

The statement by Deloitte and 1MDB that the audited financial statements of 2013 and 2014 of 1MDB can no longer be relied upon poses a very serious question of whether both accounts in the respective years were properly audited by Deloitte.

Audited accounts under the Companies Act when audited by auditors constitute a final position of a company’s financial status and lawfully should represent a fair and true of the company’s financial status. Within a prescribed period the accounts are then submitted to the Suruhanjaya Syarikat Malaysia (Companies Commission of Malaysia or SSM) for their record and retention.

For all intents and purposes, all audited accounts of companies submitted to the SSM are deemed to be final and definitely not allowed to be altered or amended in any way. The general acceptance is that all accounts audited should have been properly audited by the appointed auditors registered with the SSM.

Therefore it is extremely unusual for Deloitte to now issue a statement that the 2013 and 2014 accounts they audited cannot be relied upon. This is tantamount to saying that the accounts audited by them were not accurate in the first place and that no proper standard of accounting procedures were adopted in their course of the audit.

If any of the transactions or due diligence was of a doubtful nature then Deloitte should have made a qualification on their accounts. Did they make any qualification? No they didn’t and that certainly constitutes gross negligence on their part.

The revelation of the court papers by the US Justice Department (DOJ) last week only serves to jolt Deloitte into a state of fear that they had not done a proper audit when the DOJ’'s 136 pages of court documents outlined with clarity how the various 1MDB transactions unfolded through a web of shell companies.

Since the 1MDB board concurred with Deloitte that the 2013 and 2014 cannot be relied upon, this serves to confirm that in view of the elaborate disclosures by DOJ, the audited accounts of 2013 and 2014 was no longer consistent with the 136 pages of court papers filed by DOJ.

Deloitte must have been aware that with the comprehensive investigation being conducted in the US by the DOJ, Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and Internal Revenue Service (IRS), it is most likely that their revelations was most likely to be more accurate than the audited accounts of 1MDB which in all probability were manipulated to conceal the money transferred to third party accounts totally unrelated to International Petroleum Investment company.

The SSM should immediately conduct an enquiry to ascertain the reason why and how the 2013 and 2014 audited accounts did not bear any semblance to the transactions in the 136 pages of court documents disclosed by the DOJ. The companies commission should then determine whether any breached of the Companies Act of 1965 occurred in the submission of their false audited accounts of 2013 and 2014.

The most probable assumption one can derive was that the 2013 and 2014 1MDB accounts were deliberately and wilfully tampered with to conceal various transactions that entailed money transferred to a series of shell companies which ultimately found its way to Riza Aziz and ‘Malaysian Official 1'.

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