KOTA KINABALU, Aug 2 — Alarmed by the recent move by the state government to push through with a controversial carbon trading deal, a coalition of civil societies in Sabah is set to file a judicial review against the state government to ensure that due diligence and other requirements are followed in the process.
LEAP (Land Empowerment Animals People) founder Cynthia Ong said that the group believes that the Nature Conservation Agreement (NCA) was not going ahead after the many objections to the lack of transparency and failure to address conservation and socio-economic concerns of the 100-year renewable contract.
“The decision to side-line the state attorney-general (AG) and press forward regardless only deepens our concern that the common heritage of Sabahans is being handed over to private interests without due regard to proper procedures and accountability.
“This concern for proper governance is why Sabah’s civil society organisations are now initiating a Judicial Review to determine if the state government complied with the relevant laws and procedures in the approval of the NCA,” she said.
“One focus of this judicial review will be on discovering whether the Sabah government ever undertook and applied the required due diligence, prior to or since signing the contract,” Sabah Environmental Protection Association president Alexander Yee said.
The group’s contentions, among others, was the awarding of the contract to the little-known Singapore firm Hoch Standard Pte Ltd, which they claimed had no record of managing natural capital.
Hoch Standard Pte Ltd is listed by the official Accounting and Corporate Regulatory Authority of the Singapore government as entirely owned by a new entity called Lionsgate Ltd in the British Virgin Islands. Meanwhile, the actual owners of Lionsgate are hidden.
“In the absence of transparency by either the state government or Hoch Standard, civil society has launched its own due diligence to identify in the British Virgin Islands the beneficial owner/s of the NCA.
“Sabahans deserve to know who has acquired these extraordinary financial rights over our natural heritage and to know if there are any conflicts of interests between them and the NCA’s state government proponents,” said Yee.
The controversial NCA, signed in a low-profile ceremony in October 2021, gives the rights to Sabah’s natural resources from over two million hectares for 100 years for carbon trading to Hoch Standard.
The deal was slammed by conservation groups and a statement allegedly from the State AG’s office said that the agreement had not addressed several parameters and was not legally enforceable. Others claimed that the contract was unfairly biased to the firm.
However, deputy chief minister Datuk Seri Jeffrey Kitingan, the main proponent of the deal, insisted that the agreement, along with the required due diligence was ongoing. He also said that unnamed parties had interfered and maliciously sent out the statement using the State AG’s name.
He had said that there was no official objection from the AG’s office provided to the NCA Steering and Management Committee which he chairs.
Yesterday, Chief Minister Datuk Seri Hajiji Noor also said that the government was in the process of fine-tuning the deal, which would be beneficial for the state at large.
