It’s been over eight months since Mohamed Apandi Ali took over the post of attorney-general and the country’s top prosecutor himself marvelled how he has managed to survive.

“I'm marvelled, shocked, how I managed to survive the eight months,” he said.

Apandi was responding to Bernama chairperson Azman Ujang who asked him to describe his last eight months as attorney-general after the former federal court judge’s luncheon talk to media practitioners in Kuala Lumpur today.

The attorney-general admitted that it had been a challenging experience, especially since he took the seat in a very trying period.

“(I) took the job in an atmosphere which was not most conducive (but) I took it as a challenge.

“I always like challenges, I always tell myself and everybody, as long as the job involves law, of which I have the passion for, the interest is there.

“However difficult, I would enjoy it. Although I’m faced with criticism, I take it in stride,” he said.

The former Federal Court judge was a deputy public prosecutor (DPP) who served in Terengganu and Kelantan from 1977 to 1980.

Apandi had replaced his predecessor Abdul Gani Patail at the height of a task force's investigation into 1MDB’s scandals in July last year.

In January this year, he cleared Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak from criminal wrongdoing in the RM2.6 billion donation and RM42 million SRC International cases.

It has not even been a year since he became the country’s top prosecutor but his time has certainly been far from uneventful.

Najib’s number one critic, former premier Dr Mahathir Mohamad, had even urged Apandi to swear on the Quran that the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission (MACC) and Bank Negara had not implicated Najib in graft.

Mahathir’s challenge came after Apandi dismissed both Bank Negara and the MACC’s probes.