SARAWAK doesn’t need an “apple-polishing finance minister” who goes out of his way to please the state, Deputy Chief Minister James Masing told Lim Guan Eng today.

“It’s not his duty to please Sarawak. He got things all wrong,” Masing said in response to comments Lim made after tabling Budget 2020 last Friday that Sarawak was “hard to please”.

Masing said all Sarawak wants is a fair deal based on what it should have in accordance with the federal constitution.

This included what was promised to Sarawak in the Pakatan Harapan manifesto during the 14th general election.

Masing said: “17% of the development funds in the budget is given to Sarawak (and Sabah). That’s not a fair deal when we pump out 85,000 barrels of crude oil per day.”

The Parti Rakyat Sarawak (PRS) president said apart from failing to fulfil his GE14 promises, Lim, “whenever he opens his mouth, he never said anything positive about Sarawak”.

“How does he expect Sarawakians to be thankful to him?”

Earlier, Gabungan Parti Sarawak (GPS) chief whip in Parliament Fadillah Yusof slammed the allocation of RM9.6 billion – RM4.4 billion to Sarawak and RM5.2 billion to Sabah – as another failure of the PH coalition to make good its GE14 promise to allocate 30% of the budget to Sarawak. – October 16, 2019.