DAP veteran Lim Kit Siang has urged former Sabah chief minister Tan Sri Joseph Pairin Kitingan to come clean on his role as the chairperson of a working committee on the royal commission of inquiry (RCI) into illegal immigrants in Sabah.
His comment came amid an ongoing row between Parti Bersatu Sabah (PBS) and Barisan Nasional (BN) over the matter.
Last week, Minister in the Prime Minister’s Department (Sabah and Sarawak Affairs) Datuk Seri Dr Maximus Ongkili claimed that a BN component party had given identity cards (ICs) to undocumented migrants in exchange for their votes.
Without mentioning the name of the party or when this was allegedly done, the PBS president said its involvement in using undocumented migrants for its own political interests had been proven by the RCI.
“So, my first question to Pairin is why the working committee on the RCI did not release the over 5,000 missing pages of the report on Dec 3, 2014. Did the working committee have access to these missing pages?” Lim asked.
“The RCI report on illegal immigrants in Sabah should be thickest and most voluminous of all RCI reports in the nation’s story but it was only 368 pages.”
Lim further noted that the RCI received 361 memorandums and 177 exhibits and held public hearings from January 14 until September 2013 and had 211 witnesses.
“Where are the memorandums, notes of evidence, the statutory declarations and exhibits which were submitted?” he queried.
“Why (is it that) nobody knows what the working committee did? What had the working committee under Pairin achieved?” – July 4, 2022
