UMNO’s cash “donations” to PAS went towards paying the election deposits of the Islamist party’s candidates in the May 9 polls, Sarawak Report said.

In its latest expose, the whistleblower site said it had received confirmation that the millions of ringgit PAS received paid for the party’s record number of election deposits in the 14th general election.

“It certainly presents a very different picture to the claims made by PAS president Abdul Hadi Awang that there was no collusion during the election and no alliance between the parties,” the report said.

“PAS was still claiming at the last election to be an opposition party for Umno/BN and insisted that the unprecedented and extremely expensive decision to fight in all federal and state seats had nothing to do with a plan to split the opposition vote on behalf of Umno.”

As it turned out, the report said it was Umno who secretly paid for PAS to contest the seats.

It noted that almost immediately after the elections, the two parties openly appeared as allies, to the extent of supporting each other’s candidates at the by-elections following GE14.

“It begs the question as to whether Hadi’s new conversion to supporting Umno is purely the product of a sudden willingness ‘to forget past wrongs and unite Muslims’ or just a question of bought friendship in the form of those paid for deposits and indeed the other inputs of cash from Umno into PAS which Hadi’s senior supporter Nik Abduh referred to in a tape that he at first denied was genuine, but now admits was true?”

PAS president Abdul Hadi Awang had filed a defamation suit in London against Sarawak Report editor Clare Rewcastle-Brown, who broke the story that PAS was paid RM90 million by Umno for its cooperation in GE14.

After months of litigation, he made a surprise offer to settle the case on undisclosed terms, which the defendant accepted.

Early this month, Hadi reached an out of court settlement with Sarawak Report via a consent order at the London High Court of Justice. No order was made as to costs.

Rewcastle-Brown was not required to take down the offending article entitled “As Najib denies all over 1MDB, let’s not forget his many other criminal connections” published on August 6, 2016.

The article suggested that money was given in exchange for PAS’ support for Barisan Nasional and that former prime minister Najib Razak had lured PAS from the opposition by funnelling RM90 million to the top echelons of the Islamist party.  – February 21, 2019.