I refer to the Malaysiakini report Explosive revelations against Lingam .

The revelation by GN Jayanthi, a former secretary of lawyer VK Lingam, that she was paid RM3,000 by the Anti-Corruption Agency is very troubling indeed. Many people reading this report are likely to jump to the conclusion she was chosen, among millions of Malaysians, to receive this windfall to appease her for the closure of the corruption investigation concerning Lingam in 1998.

What we do not know - and are unlikely to know given the manner in which the inquiry is being steered by the royal commission’s chairperson Haidar Mohd Noor - is how Jayanthi was involved in the 1998 investigation. While she could not say why she was offered this money, it may be interesting to know why she accepted the money.

What did she think it was for? It may seem a tad unfair to accuse the ACA of engaging in a corrupt practice because a number of the jigsaw pieces are missing. Still, the inference to corruption from this report is certainly strong. Is this fair to the ACA?

Nevertheless, the ACA is certainly an organisation that is in great need of a vigorous shake-up and re-branding, especially after this inquiry.

It was a sad day for this agency when one of its most senior investigators, senior superintendant Chuah Lay Choo , was shown to have conducted an investigation in a rather shoddy manner. It is unbelievable that she would accept information from ‘potential criminals’ (the term used by the Bar Council's Ranjit Singh) without any verification.

For example, do any of the ‘players’ have phone numbers that are not on the list volunteered by them? It’s a basic question to ask but not, it seems, for the ACA. She also did not investigate the two ‘sufficiently long’ calls made to Singapore on that particular day in December, a few years ago. She only examined that one day when nothing seemed certain and then called that a complete investigation.

Why, even one of the commissioners had the common sense to tell her to examine the whole month of December. Apparently, this was advice she did deemed not sensible. One could perhaps believe that all this could happen if the investigator was an unthinking novice or if Chuah didn’t have a brain. But she is certainly not a novice and I would think that she has a brain. So was the investigation intended to be useless?

And what about the integrity of the commission? I will start with the premise that they are honest and clean and will do a good and thorough job. So what will they do about this half-baked investigation by the ACA? Will the panel compel the ACA to re-do their work? We do not know from the published reports whether or not such an order has been made. If not, how could they begin to write an objective report?

How will the panel deal with Lingam, who nonchalantly asserts that the Indian man in the tape ‘looks like him and sounds like him’ but may not actually be him? How could he say this when he could identify the Chinese man whom he had asserted earlier was never his client and then provide information to locate him in Melaka?

Let us keep our eyes and ears wide open.