In mid-December 2012, a handful of Malaysia’s top lawyers adjourned for late drinks at a bar in a posh Kuala Lumpur hotel after attending a wedding dinner.
What exactly transpired among the group of friends that evening is now the focus of a nearly two-year probe into charges of misconduct against one of the attendees, who has been implicated in the widely publicised murder of a Mongolian woman nine years ago.
After six months of quizzing a dozen witnesses, including those present at the drinks party, a three-member disciplinary panel of Malaysia’s Bar Council is expected to decide in coming weeks whether Cecil Wilbert Mohanraj Abraham, one of Malaysia’s most senior lawyers, did engage in professional misconduct.
He is alleged to have acted improperly by drafting a private investigator’s sworn statement that government critics claim was part of a conspiracy to limit the fallout from the killing of Altantuya Shaariibuu by two police commandos.
The officers were at the time of her murder members of Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak’s security detail.
Abraham, who declined to respond to questions for this article, has never made any public comment on allegations that first surfaced in late 2012 that he was involved in preparing the statement by the investigator.
Lawyers familiar with the tribunal proceedings say that Abraham has testified in recent months that he was not involved in any way in the making of the statement.
But the tribunal has also heard statements from other lawyers who have insisted that Abraham had privately admitted his role in drafting the sworn statement, which was also the subject of discussion at the mid-December drinks session.
Disciplinary cases are common in the Malaysian Bar Council, which counts close to 15,000 lawyers as members. The Advocates and Solicitors Disciplinary Board – an independent body under the Bar Council empowered to investigate professional misconduct – receives as many as 600 complaints against lawyers annually. These complaints largely involve dishonesty among solicitors who misuse funds belonging to their clients.
Few have attracted the kind of intense public scrutiny as the complaint against Abraham. Here’s why.
For starters, it was the Bar Council itself that lodged the grievance with the disciplinary tribunal demanding an investigation into Abraham.
Then the disciplinary case goes directly to the heart of one of the biggest scandals that continues to bedevil the Najib administration – the murder in October 2006 of Altantuya, a part-time Mongolian translator, whose body was obliterated with hard-to-come-by C4 explosives in a jungle clearing outside Kuala Lumpur.
A one-time political advisor to Najib, Abdul Razak Baginda, admitted to having an affair with Altantuya and was charged with abetting the murder. But he was acquitted without having to present a defence.
Thirdly, there has been renewed public interest in the Altantuya murder in recent weeks. The two police commandos were found guilty of the murder in 2009 and sentenced to death, but their convictions were overturned and they were freed in 2013 over gaps in the evidence. This January, however, Malaysia’s highest court reinstated the convictions.
One of the two convicted killers, Sirul Azhar Umar, was arrested later in January in Brisbane, Australia, after fleeing Malaysia in October, and there is widespread speculation that the rogue officer could shed fresh light into the murder in order to secure asylum and avoid extradition and execution in Malaysia.
In particular, analysts say that Sirul could reveal the identity of the person, or persons, who ordered the two policemen to carry out the murder, an issue that both the defence and the prosecution failed to address in the lengthy murder trial.
Meanwhile, the disciplinary charge against Abraham is another possible window into why Altantuya was murdered.
The following account of events leading to the disciplinary charge and the many twists in the tribunal’s proceedings that have involved Kuala Lumpur’s leading legal lights are based on interviews with lawyers closely tracking the case.
Most of those involved directly in the matter have declined comment on grounds that disciplinary proceeds are held in secret.
The charge against Abraham principally revolves around the affairs of the private investigator P. Balasubramaniam, who died in 2013.
Balasumbramaniam, who had formerly been attached to the Special Branch division of the Malaysian police, was hired by Najib’s one-time advisor Abdul Razak Baginda to protect his family against harassment and threats from Altantuya.
Balasubramaniam testified in the trial against Abdul Razak and the two police officers in mid-2007. Displeased with the court proceedings, the private investigator signed a statutory declaration, as it is known in Malaysian law, on July 1, 2008, claiming that the police investigations were compromised to protect powerful political personalities.
It included allegations that Najib, who was deputy prime minister at the time, and Altantuya knew each other and had even had an affair. (Najib has always denied ever having met Altantuya).
That statement was made public at a press conference on July 3, 2008, but just a day later, in an astonishing about-turn, the private investigator made a second sworn statement retracting all of his previous claims. He and his family shortly afterwards fled the country and went into hiding.
Balasubramaniam reappeared in November 2009, and in a widely circulated video he recounted how he was forced to sign the second statutory declaration under duress.
He also claimed that he was never introduced to the individual who prepared the second sworn statement and only dealt with businessman Deepak Jaikishan, who coordinated the entire exercise to expunge the damning first sworn statement.
Balasubramiam’s new version of events didn’t amount to much at the time. But it did turn the spotlight on Jaikishan, a businessman with interests in carpet manufacturing who was widely regarded in Kuala Lumpur’s business circles as someone who enjoyed close ties with premier Najib’s family.
Sometime in December 2012, news surfaced that Jaikishan had fallen out with the premier’s family and was facing serious financial problems because of large loans on several property deals that had gone sour.
In what appeared to be an attempt to buy time and also some powerful intervention in his problems, Jaikishan began making public statements backing Balasubramaniam’s claims on events leading to the second statutory declaration.
In several press conferences, Jaikishan acknowledged that he helped facilitate the production of the second sworn statement that Balasubramaniam had said he was forced to sign.
He never publicly identified the author of the second statutory declaration, but there was widespread speculation at the time that Jaikishan was directing the blame at Abraham in private conversations.
Abraham, who started his law career in 1970, is widely regarded as one of the country’s top litigation lawyers. He holds the rare distinction of having acted as counsel for two sitting premiers.
Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew appointed him as lead counsel in the late 1980s when the then premier sued Malaysian Star Publications newspaper group for defamation.
Abraham also acted for Dr Mahathir Mohamad in a 2000 case in which the then Malaysian premier resisted moves by political rival Anwar Ibrahim to have him testify as a witness in the latter’s corruption trial.
A former senior partner of Shearn Delamore, one of Malaysia’s most prestigious firms, Abraham is currently a senior partner at Zul Rafique & Partners, a mid-sized legal firm considered one of Malaysia’s most politically well-connected law outfits.
According to lawyers close to the situation, the Bar Council wrote to Abraham on a number of occasions in January and February 2013 enquiring whether he had any knowledge of the allegations made against him with regard to the preparation of Balasubramaniam’s sworn statement.
They say the response the Bar Council received from Abraham’s solicitors was that their client could not provide any assistance on the matter because of solicitor-client privilege and confidentiality.
Things changed dramatically in mid-March 2013. Balasubramaniam died of a heart attack, and days later lawyer Americk Singh Sidhu told a packed annual general meeting of the Bar Council that he had met Abraham a couple of weeks earlier.
Americk, who had helped Balasubramaniam prepare his first sworn statement on the Mongolian woman’s murder, publicly declared that Abraham had admitted to him that he had drafted the second statutory declaration on Najib’s instructions.
Americk also confessed that he and Abraham had agreed that the matter would remain confidential. But he was forced to break that promise after Balasubraminam’s death.
Abraham denied Americk’s allegations in response to queries from the Bar Council in early April. But that did not stop Bar Council President Christopher Leong from lodging the official complaint against Abraham for professional misconduct a day later on April 4.
The disciplinary proceedings moved at a glacial pace for much of 2013, with Abraham flatly denying Americk’s claims about what was discussed at their meeting.
Sometime in mid-March 2014, the case took a surprising twist when the lawyers acting for the Bar Council in the disciplinary hearing were informed of the drinks session at the Renaissance Hotel in Kuala Lumpur in mid-December 2012 and that Abraham’s alleged involvement in drafting the second sworn statement had emerged as a topic of conversation there.
According to sources familiar with the disciplinary probe, six lawyers were present at the drinks session. Apart from Abraham, the other senior lawyers included Tommy Thomas, a senior constitutional and corporate lawyer; Johari Razak, a partner with law firm Shearn Delamore who is also a brother of premier Najib; Lim Chee Wee, a former Bar Council president and a senior partner of Skrine & Co; and Darryl Goon of Raja, Darryl & Loh, and his wife Foo Yet Ngo, who is a prominent family lawyer.
The sources say that all of the lawyers present have been asked to provide testimony to the three-member tribunal during several closed-door hearings over the past six months.
Sources say that one of the lawyers did acknowledge that conversations with regards to the second sworn statement did take place, the rest informed the tribunal that they could not recall or that they were not aware of any such discussion taking place.
The tribunal is expected to make a decision in coming weeks, which could see either Abraham liberated from the allegations against him or face disciplinary action, which would result in his suspension, or in the most extreme circumstance, an expulsion from the Bar Council.
In the latter case, too, the questions surrounding Malaysia’s most notorious murder scandal of recent years – in particular why the second sworn statement was prepared – will not go away easily.
