The High Court in Kuala Lumpur has fixed Aug 28 for the application to strike out Prime Minister Dr Mahathir’s suit against the Royal Commission of Inquiry on foreign exchange losses in the 1990s.

Despite Mahathir's lawyer Irzan Iswat telling Justice Azizah Nawawi that he has yet to get further instructions from his client on whether to press ahead with the challenge, he agreed with senior federal counsel Mazlifah Ayob on the hearing date.

Irzan said that either he or lead counsel Mohd Haniff Khatri Abdulla will inform the court on that date whether the prime minister intends to drop the suit.

Mahathir, who led the opposition at the time, had filed suit in December against all six members of the forex RCI, saying that their report was incomplete.

The forex RCI consisted of Mohd Sidek Hassan, Kamaludin Md Said, Tajuddin Atan, Saw Choon Boon, K Pushpanathan and Yusof Ismail. Then prime minister Najib Abdul Razak, the cabinet and the government were also named as defendants in his suit.

Mahathir is seeking a declaration that the forex RCI report is invalid, as it does not include all the witness statements or testimonies of those who had testified – including written or oral requests in the form of transcripts or video recordings – or submissions made by lawyers.

He had also given the RCI a deadline of Dec 8 to include all these in the report.

Last year, Mahathir had also tried to recuse Justice Azizah from the case, because she presided over an earlier challenge against the composition of the forex RCI.

Justice Azizah dismissed the application last month, ruling that the prime minister had shown no real instances of bias.