KUALA LUMPUR, July 16 — Datuk Seri Najib Razak said former Bersatu vice-president Datuk Hamidah Osman’s claim of seeing Lim Kit Siang moot her ex-party’s formation to Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad saved him the trouble of rebutting the DAP leader.
The Barisan Nasional advisor pointed out that Lim had accused him of lying and being crazy for claiming he was told that Dr Mahathir’s party was the brainchild of the DAP stalwart.
“He challenged me to reveal my informant. Before I could take up MenHEN’s challenge, the informant already came forward.
“Eh… MenHEN. My name is not Guan Eng. I am not a liar,” Najib wrote on Facebook yesterday, using the fictitious “Minister of Najib Affairs (MenHEN)” title he uses to mock Lim’s intense scrutiny of him.
Najib was also taking aim at Lim’s son, Finance Minister Lim Guan Eng, over the Public Accounts Committee report that refuted the minister’s claim in Parliament last year that BN “robbed” the public of RM19.4 billion in tax refunds.
Last week, Najib alleged that a source informed him that Lim had pitched the idea of forming Bersatu to Dr Mahathir, with the objective of leeching support from Umno.
Lim responded by denouncing Najib as an “unscrupulous, unprincipled, Machiavellian and incorrigible liar”, before challenging him to name the informant.
Yesterday, Dr Mahathir said anybody who could come up with such an allegation deserved to be committed to a mental asylum.
Also yesterday, Hamidah held a press conference in Ipoh where she confessed she was Najib’s informant and asserted that she had been present during a 2016 meeting when Lim purportedly made the suggestion to Dr Mahathir.
Hamidah left Bersatu in 2017 along with other early members such as Anina Saadudin and Datuk Khairuddin Abu Hassan.
