Malaysia punches above its weight on illicit outflows

YOURSAY 'In proportional terms, Malaysia has the scandalous record of being the world's highest in terms of illicit capital transfer per capita.'

M'sia still bleeding billions in dirty money

Headhunter: For a small country like Malaysia, the amount of illicit outflow stated in the Global Financial Integrity (GFI) report is massive. RM173.48 billion (US$54.18 billion) is RM500 million per day.

Is there anyone out there who still think the country cannot go bankrupt? If Malays or, for that matter, the rest of us still wonder why we are poor, you should know the answer by now. We are poor because the BN and their cronies are plundering hundreds of millions of ringgit on a daily basis.

Why are we so stupid in voting for such a rotten government? And they have the cheek to accuse the rest of us of being traitors for evading taxes. Is Bank Negara Malaysia (BNM) protecting them by their inaction?

Drummond: Malaysia comes out tops again, although for all the wrong reasons. Further, added to the billions of ringgit lost in terms of economic production (incomes and wages) of the millions of emigrants (since 1969); no wonder the government has to introduce the regressive goods and services tax (GST) to temporarily mitigate its deficit. What happens when petroleum runs out?

The country has to increase the economic pie. One way is to reverse the migration of its best and brightest like what Singapore does to increase labour and its productivity. Remind our ministers that one of the factors of production is labour.

Perhaps, this will come about when PKR director of strategy Rafizi Ramli is finance minister and Zaid Ibrahim returns as the de facto law minister.

Swipenter: It is a reflection of the poor confidence of those who are loaded with money earned legally or illegally of the future prospects of Bolehland.

Sadly, this is not confined only to those who are loaded, but also a huge section of the population, especially the educated and professional class.

Let Umno continue with their politics of race, religion, discrimination plus their connivance of massive corruption and come 2020 (maybe earlier), Bolehland would be crying instead of attaining Wawasan 2020.

Since post-1997, huge sums of money have been flowing out of Bolehland annually. The Asia financial crisis and globalisation exposed the fundamental weaknesses of the administration of former PM Dr Mahathir Mohamad.

Bolehland is consumed by politics of race and religion and massive corruption.

SomebodyElse: BNM can set up anything they like, but if they aren't able to go after their bosses such as those in BN and their cronies, then it is just a waste of time.

YF: That's like 20 percent of our country's gross domestic product (GDP) being robbed by these folks.

Usually these illegal funds are allowed to be channeled out because the authorities who are assigned to prevent this from happening are themselves allowing it to happen.

And who controls these authorities? If the records of a Mongolian lady can be easily erased from their data, what more these? Absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Mushiro: This has been going on the last few years and Bank Negara has got lots of excuses. The culprits are ministers, political leaders, cronies followed by businessmen and tax evaders.

Bank Negara is quick to act on small legal money traders but knowingly protect their masters from Umno who are ‘traitors' to the country.

Cogito Ergo Sum: While the Global Financial Integrity (GFI) report is quite comprehensive, what is not so transparent are mechanics of how these funds are taken out. What are the ways and means which this money goes out?

Money changers pretending to take out cash, politicians carrying bags of money, etc. I hope some examples can be cited so that we will not be left with our imaginations running wild.

Abasir: "...unrecorded financial flows, which are not necessarily synonymous with ‘illicit financial flows'," said Bank Negara.

Here we go again. BNM, under the auspices of Umno, gets into denial mode and continues pulling batik over the eyes of a gullible population programmed to react only to the 'Allah' issue, LGBT, DAP, Shiite, Pakatan Rakyat and other red herrings.

Onyourtoes: Of course, net errors and omissions (NEOs) as reported over years by Malaysia were not random. If errors are random, don't you think for certain years they should give us a positive illegal capital flight?

Proarte: Opposition Leader Anwar Ibrahim, are you reading this report? You have the audacity to mention on the misconception of 'moral vacancy' in the West and wax lyrical about Islam but fail to see the moral degeneracy of Islamic governance in Malaysia.

Do you blame the rest of the world including the West if they consider Islam to be 'morally repugnant' based on the scale of capital flight from Malaysia?

China has a population which is about 50 times more than Malaysia yet our 'dirty money' transactions are a third that of China from 2002-2011; about RM3 trillion and RM1 trillion respectively.

We must give the devil its due, 'dirty money' transactions were 300 percent less under Mahathir (RM60 billion in 2002) than under Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak and his wife (RM180 billion in 2010 ).

In proportional terms, Malaysia has the scandalous record of being the world's highest in terms of illicit capital transfer per capita. Now we know why Umno has to invent bogeymen like the 'Allah' and 'Shiite' scam just to distract the public from the grand scale theft.

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