In an apparent swipe at former prime minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad, Communication and Multimedia Minister Salleh Said Keruak has pointed out that Labuan is among the world’s top tax havens.

The federal territory, an island located off Sabah, was ranked 12 out of 82 tax havens in the world, he said without specifying the source of the rankings.

"For Malaysia (Labuan) to become number 12 on a list of 82 tax havens, the most crucial element would be banking secrecy and tax savings. This is how they all operate.

"And if placing money in tax havens were a crime, then Labuan, the brainchild of Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad, would need to be closed down," Salleh said in a blog post last night.

On the list of tax havens, Labuan is ranked behind Panama, where the massive information leak dubbed as Panama Papers came from, he noted.

Salleh explained that a tax haven is a “state, country or territory where certain taxes are levied at a very low rate or not at all”, and that usually they also offer financial secrecy.

Despite that, tax havens in themselves are not illegal, he stressed, but added that the Panama Papers debate was on whether the money in such offshore accounts should be hidden because they were "ill-gotten".

"I suppose the issue of tax havens is not so much the issue of doing something illegal, but more about whether it is moral," he mused, pointing out that that is what is being debated in the UK regarding the British prime minister's father's name appearing in the Panama Papers.

Salleh's comments comes as Umno leaders continue to roast Mahathir after the former prime minister quit Umno and began working with opposition leaders and NGOs.

The Panama Papers, which was released on the weekend, was a global effort of journalists coordinated by US-based International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ).

It has been described the largest data leak that journalists have ever worked with, comprising 11.5 million documents that shed light on 214,000 shell companies.

It reportedly took the combined efforts of 370 journalists in 78 countries one year to sift through the documents.

Yesterday, the Iceland prime minister was the first to quit after his wife was implicated in the Panama Papers.