Malaysians know well the perfidy of currency speculation. After all, we got burnt  big time. No, not during the 1997 financial crisis, but much earlier, circa late 1980s.

In those days, Bank Negara was so steep in currency speculation that the financial health of quite a few Singapore-based banks had depended on its activities.

The central bank then earned the reputation of a market bully because it operated in US$50 million (then RM125 million) lots each time, and could do billions a day.

Put simply, Bank Negara was the mother of all currency speculators. So much so that its forex speculation raised grave concerns among other monetary officials who were seeking to stabilise the market.

But Prime Minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad had defended the practice. Malaysias economy was strong, he said. It had large reserves and the bank had the ability and knowledge.

Wrong bet

Not quite. By 1994, Bank Negara publicly conceded that it had lost as much as RM15 billion.

It wasnt such a case earlier. Analysts had estimated that the bank made between RM3 billion to RM4 billion in profits when it first entered the forex market.

However, something went terribly wrong in 1993. Bank Negara betted heavily against infamous currency trader George Soros on the pound sterling. The bank eventually lost the gamble and Soros walked away with a hefty booty and earned Mahathirs undying hatred.

Then opposition leader Lim Kit Siang had lamented in Parliament: Apparently, George Soros made his RM5 billion profit by selling sterling short, while Bank Negara made its RM16 billion losses by buying sterling long.

It is not clear how much Malaysia lost in those five notorious years when it dabbled heavily in the money markets. Lim said it could be as high as RM30 billion. But the actual sum was never revealed.

Political masters

New Straits Times yesterday ran a report that flashed: Malaysiakini admits receiving funds: RM1.3 million investment from George Soros-linked MDLF.

The headline suggested as if malaysiakini had something to hide when we had called a press conference to announce the deal on Monday.

Never mind the fact that MDLF is made up of 15 investors including Soros. Or that our link to Soros is no different from those who would argue that Malaysia accepts funds from Israel because the United Nations grant it receives has Israel as one of its donors.

But the slant in the report, coming from an Umno-linked newspaper, is not all that surprising. Clearly, NST has its political masters to serve.

After all, the papers editor-in-chief Abdullah Ahmad declared only two weeks ago that media freedom is the freedom of its owners to advance their personal, political, class or communal interests.

We, however, beg to differ.

No doubt, journalists are sworn to serve one master. Our master, however, is not the newspaper owner. Our master is Truth.

Indeed, the debate on press freedom is not so much who the media owners are  MCA, Umno, Vincent Tan or even Soros  but whether these owners respect the right of journalists to carry out their task professionally.

No interference deal

Which is why we signed an agreement with our investor, MDLF, that they "shall not interfere in the editorial policy" and that malaysiakini will continue to adhere to "the principles of a free, independent and responsible press, and exercise fact-based, honest, unbiased, fair, non-partisan, investigative and responsible journalism  independent from the influence of the government or of any other interest group".

No other media owner in Malaysia has ever signed such a pact with their journalists. Perhaps they need not bother  after all, as Abdullah implied, journalists are expected to serve the interests of their pay masters.

Back to Bank Negara.

The man responsible for the multi-billion ringgit debacle was the banks then foreign exchange department chief Nor Mohamad Yakcop. Having almost bankrupted Bank Negara, Nor is now in the Prime Ministers Department helping Mahathir to rescue the country's near-bankrupt companies.

But the irony doesnt stop there.

If indeed malaysiakini was funded by Soros as some have claimed, part of that investment could indeed come from Malaysian taxpayers themselves  from the billions which Bank Negara lost in those days of infamy when currency speculation was, according to Mahathir, merely a case of actively managing our reserves.