PKR president Anwar Ibrahim has welcomed the call by former prime minister Najib Abdul Razak for the Attorney-General's Chambers to reopen the files on the RM33 billion foreign exchange (forex) scandal in the 1990s.

Anwar, who was deputy prime minister and finance minister during that period, thanked Najib for the suggestion in Najib’s Facebook post and stressed that he had done nothing wrong concerning the scandal.

"If we want to investigate the forex scandal, I agree, there's no hindrance to it.

"What is important is that I did not steal a single sen, I did not steal RM1 billion, I didn't take timber and stocks.

"Therefore, if (the authorities) want to investigate forex or 1MDB, please go ahead," Anwar said in a tazkirah (reflection) aired live on his Facebook yesterday.

The Port Dickson MP noted that in 1997 when he was the finance minister, the national debt was only at RM89 billion as compared to RM90 billion a year prior.

Anwar also brought the figure to comparison with the 2011 national debt, which sat at RM456 billion.

The Royal Commission of Inquiry (RCI) looking into the forex scandal in 2017 found that Bank Negara lost RM31.5 billion in foreign exchange trading between 1992 and 1994, and opined that this “excessive” and “speculative” trading amounted to a criminal breach of trust under Sections 406 and 409 of the Penal Code.

It recommended that the then prime minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad and his deputy Anwar be investigated to determine whether they had concealed facts from the cabinet.

However, last year, the then de facto law minister Liew Vui Keong had said that the police report based on findings of the Royal Commission of Inquiry on the matter has been classified as "no further action".

This is due to a lack of documentary evidence of the alleged misconduct, and also that the original complainant - the RCI’s secretary Yusof Ismail - had also retracted the police report that was lodged on Nov 30, 2017.

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