I’d like your readers to ponder on the following matter, then decide on who we should be suspicious of. In the current ongoing Parliament session, the parliamentary opposition leader queried on the Matrade building delay, which has costs the government an additional RM90 million.

In response, the deputy minister of the relevant ministry stated that his ministry had initially decided to award the building’s contract to Company A in 1992, but was directed by ‘the then Finance Minister (Anwar Ibrahim) to award the contract’ to another Company B in 1993.

My questions are:

• Does a finance minister have a right to ‘dictate’ the award of a contract to a specific party?
  
  
• Can Anwar provide any reasons or grounds for directing the ministry concerned to redirect the contract to another company?
  
  
• Why didn’t the opposition leader, or any of the opposition MPs for the matter, follow-up with supplementary questions to obtain relevant information concerning the above two questions?

It is little wonder that our former prime minister commented that MPs at times do not ask the right questions.