KUALA LUMPUR – Convicted former prime minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak will likely file a new petition for a royal pardon, his lawyer Tan Sri Muhammad Shafee Abdullah said today.
He confirmed this to the press at the Kuala Lumpur courthouse today.
"We are seriously thinking about another petition for pardon. Full pardon. We’re waiting for the right timing."
“It wouldn’t be so soon, as the current Yang di-Pertuan Agong has yet to warm his seat,” he told reporters at the courthouse.
Shafee said the Agong’s prerogative on the sentence reduction was non-justiciable and that his discretion was absolute.
The lawyer slammed the “clumsy” press statement issued by the Federal Territories Pardons Board through the legal affairs unit of the Prime Minister’s Department on February 2.
He said someone in the Pardons Board secretariat “or whoever crafted the statement wasn’t doing the arithmetic”, in reference to a sentence in the press statement that said Najib had been granted a 50% reduction in his jail sentence and fine.
In actual fact, only his jail sentence was halved, from 12 years to six. The original fine of RM210 million was reduced to RM50 million.
“Fifty percent out of RM210 million is not RM50 million! It was 50% on imprisonment and RM50 million fine, not 50% on both,” Shafee said.
Najib’s original sentence and fine was ordered by the high court in July 2020 for misappropriating RM42 million of SRC International Sdn Bhd’s funds.
The Federal Court upheld the conviction and sentence in 2022, and he began serving his prison term on August 23, 2020.
Under his reduced sentence, Najib will be released on August 23, 2028 if he pays the RM50 million fine, but will remain incarcerated for a year longer, until August 23, 2029, if he fails to do so. However, he is also eligible to apply for parole next year, after serving half of his reduced sentence. – February 7, 2024
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