WHISTLE-BLOWER Lalitha Kunaratnam’s investigative reports into Azam Baki’s corporate shareholdings and business ties were based on unreliable sources, the anti-graft agency chief commissioner said in a response to the researcher’s defence statement to his defamation suit.

Azam, who filed his response at the Kuala Lumpur High Court today, said Lalitha had relied on reports and news issued by the blogs such as Edisi Siasat, Steadyku47 and an anonymous Twitter account, without any due diligence to verify the facts.

Azam said Edisi Siasat was not a verifiable source and Lalitha had used the allegations made in the blog’s reports into her own by publishing them in the articles she wrote about him.

The Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission (MACC) chief commissioner also said Lalitha’s articles and her tweets had caused the public to believe he was indeed corrupt, and that her allegations were true.

He included as an example, comments posted by readers to an article in Malaysiakini, which he said showed the public had already come to the conclusion that all allegations against him were true.

Azam also said that Lalitha replied followers to her Twitter account by thanking them and made no effort to mitigate the “extreme comments” against him by other social media users.

“Instead, the defendant herself made provocative comments as if to challenge the plaintiff to sue her which clearly drove her followers to post further “extreme and disgusting” comments. 

Azam said Lalitha had now deactivated her Twitter account (@LalithaVelvet), which he said was “intended to hide all evidence that will be raised by the plaintiff during trial”.

The MACC chief sued Lalitha on January 12 over a two-part article titled “Business ties among MACC leadership: How deep does it go?”, which were published on the Independent News Service portal on October 26 last year, and again on December 15.

Former MACC panel member Dr Edmund Terence Gomez used the information in Lalitha’s articles to highlight concerns about Azam to the heads of two internal agency oversight panels.

Gomez resigned in December after no action was taken to address the allegations against Azam, who was said to have owned millions of corporate shares in two public listed companies in 2015 and 2016 when he was director of investigations.

In his response to Lalitha’s defence statement, Azam said Gomez’s resignation did not make the allegations him true or factual.

He rejected all of Lalitha’s claims in her defence statement, saying her claims were unproven, unverifiable, were not reported in a neutral manner and had malicious intent to defame him.

“There is no need to compel the plaintiff to answer all allegations, which are baseless, what more when they are drawn from reports that are unlicensed, unofficial and have unknown (anonymous) individuals behind them,” he said.

He added that he had already answered the allegations and had been “completely cleared” by MACC Anti-Corruption Advisory Board chairman Abu Zahar Ujang, “who was satisfied that no wrong had been committed by the plaintiff”.

He said this conclusion was reached “based on true facts”, which among others, are that the plaintiff is not the beneficial owner of the said shares and warrants, and that the Securities Commission had also cleared his name from any wrongdoing according to shares trading laws.

Azam said as such, Lalitha could not rely on the neutral reportage principle as well as the Reynolds Privilege as her defence.

Lalitha, in her statement of defence filed at the court on February 4, said the information in her articles about Azam had come from confirmed sources.

Azam is seeking a court order to prevent Lalitha from republishing the articles or causing defamatory the statements to be repeated, a deletion of the articles and tweets, a public apology in newspapers and social media platforms, as well as RM10 million in general damages, aggravated damages, interests, costs and other reliefs deemed fit by the court. – February 15, 2022.