Malaysian companies with interests in Burma are sinking into the depths of hell and 'doing business with the Devil', said Minister in the Prime Minister's Department Mohd Nazri Abdul Aziz.

"Would you like to do business with a government belonging to Stalin or Hitler?" he asked.

He was speaking to reporters after officiating a conference in Kuala Lumpur on good governance, democracy and Asean organised by the Asean Interparliamentary Myanmar Caucus.

"As a member of parliament, I don't thing I want to do business with the devil. There is a limit to our conscience.

"How can we do business with the Devil?" he said when asked to comment on Malaysian interests in the military-ruled nation.

"We cannot be thinking just about business while basic human rights are being abused everyday," he stressed, adding that he was speaking in his capacity as a parliamentarian.

On its website last updated yesterday, the Brussels-based International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU) listed 468 companies that are allegedly doing business with the military junta in Burma, including 27 Malaysian firms.

A number of them, however, had earlier replied to ICFTU regarding their investments in Burma by either denying any links to the Burmese junta or stating that they no longer conducts business in the country.

Petronas' deals

When asked about national petroleum company Petronas, which was cited by the US State Department as among the major non-US foreign investors in Burma, Nazri was unequivocal.

"It should go do business somewhere else," said the minister, who also heads the Parliamentary Human Rights Caucus.

"We understand the position of our government that is continuously tied to the culture and regulations of politics, not to interfere in each other's internal affairs," he said.

"(But) we as MPs, elected representatives of the people and of the various Asean countries, we have the right to voice out what we feel.

"We will continue to put pressure on the government of Myanmar so that they realise that the time has come for them to hold elections in Myanmar," he added.

Nazri also expressed shock at the extended detention of Burmese pro-democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi's house arrest and the continued incarceration of political activists.

"What is done to Aung San Suu Kyi reminds us today of Hitler's days, of Stalin's days. That it is happening now is a shock to us," he said.

In his opening remarks to the conference earlier, Nazri called the elections and institutions of Burma "a sham" and dismissed the individuals involved in the drafting of Burma's constitution as either "forced" or "paid".

"Myanmar is not in tandem with what we aspire to have in Asean. It is a black dot in the history of Asean," he told participants.