But Pua took Salleh to task for trying to play down the significance of the Auditor-General’s report to the committee, which has been classified as an official secret and was not made public when the committee presented its report to the Dewan Rakyat.
Pua, who is MP for Petaling Jaya Utara, was a member of the committee, which is parliament’s watchdog on government spending.
He rejected Salleh’s insinuation that the A-G’s report was inconclusive or incomplete, saying: “All the findings in the A-G’s Report must be deemed factual and dealt with accordingly by the authorities. The question of the A-G’s Report being ‘incomplete’ does not arise at all.”
He said PAC members, from the government backbench and opposition, “concurred fully with the A-G’s Report and never at any point of time disagreed or rejected the findings.”
He accused Salleh of trying to persuade Malaysians that the A-G’s findings were not a “final” report and hence should be ignored.
Yesterday, Salleh had said in a blog posting: “In fact, the auditor-general’s report is not complete because it addresses just one aspect of 1MDB. The complete report is the one from the PAC because it not only takes into account the auditor-general’s report but all the other information gathered as well.”
Pua took issue with Salleh’s remark, saying in a statement today that the A-G’s Report was not merely “‘one aspect of 1MDB’ as Salleh claimed, but an integral part of the PAC Report, without which the PAC Report would be incomplete.”
He said the PAC had relied almost entirely on the auditor’s findings and its members understood that the A-G’s Report was to be tabled in Parliament together with the PAC Report to provide MPs with a complete picture with detailed facts and figures.
He said PAC made extensive references to the auditor’s findings, without citing the details, “for the simple reason” that both reports would be presented together.
He criticised PAC chairman Hasan Arifin for first stating that the federal audit report would no longer be classified a secret once PAC tabled its findings, and then later rescinding his decision.