Attorney-general Mohamed Apandi Ali has dismissed a recent series of personal attacks by two online portals against him and claimed that its owners were paid to tarnish his reputation.

"Those portals are (run by) mercenaries, so when they are paid, they will write.

"My response to them would be, 'go fly a kite'... I don't care about what they wrote," Apandi is quoted as saying by Malay daily Utusan Malaysia today (below).

He said this when asked for comments on an article titled "Apandi Ali needs to resign as Attorney-General with immediate effect" which was published by Raja Petra Kamaruddin's online blog Malaysia Today and another portal, The Third Force.

Malaysia Today was recently mired in controversy for a slew of articles it ran on The Malaysian Insight and its editor-in-chief, Jahabar Saddiq, the brother of Apandi's wife Faridah Begum KA Abdul Kader.

The articles Malaysia Today ran alleged that there was interference in the affairs of the Attorney-General's Chambers.

Faridah had on Feb 13 lodged a police report against Malaysia Today over an allegedly defamatory article.

“I am lodging a police report based on an article that Raja Petra Kamaruddin wrote on me.

"Any more than that I can't say; I am leaving the matter to the police," she was quoted as saying by the News Straits Times after she made the report last Tuesday.

Since then, the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission had last Friday instructed Malaysia Today to take down a Feb 11 article titled "First Lady AGC Walking The Path of Grace Mugabe".