The following is an exclusive excerpt from Chapter 30 of ‘Lim Kit Siang: Malaysian First, Volume One: None But the Bold’, a new biography by Kee Thuan Chye.

In January 1984, Dr Mahathir Mohamad finally conceded to public pressure and set up a three-man committee of inquiry into the BMF scandal. It was, however, not the royal commission of inquiry that Lim Kit Siang had repeatedly asked for.

The committee would be headed by the government’s auditor-general, Ahmad Noordin Zakaria, described by Kit as a man “famous for his impeccable integrity”, and assisted by lawyer Chooi Mun Sou and accountant Ramli Ibrahim. Mahathir told the media that they had been selected “on the basis of their neutral standing in the affair”.

All the same, few Malaysians expected the committee to get far in its investigations given the complexity of the case, the political pitfalls that it would probably face, and the narrowness of its terms of reference since it was briefed to probe only the Carrian link with BMF, excluding the bank’s relationships with Kevin Hsu and the Eda Group.

Kit expressed his party’s disappointment with the arrangement. He said “nobody believes that a handful of BMF officials” could commit loans to the tune of RM2.5 billion “without the highest political approval being granted”, and therefore only a high-powered inquiry like an RCI could get to the bottom of the scandal.

In September, Ahmad Noordin himself supported the RCI proposal. He told the national news agency Bernama that only an RCI, headed by a judge, would have the power to establish if anyone was criminally liable as it could summon witnesses to testify under oath.

By then, Ahmad Noordin and his committee had already submitted their first interim report to Bank Bumiputera on Aug 17, after seven months of hard work. But the government was reluctant to release it...