“The debate has nothing to do with me and the police. If they want to debate, it’s up to them.
“It is only when it involves safety and security that we will come in,” he said at a press conference at the Brickfields district police station today.
Mahathir has confirmed he will take part in the debate after Nazri told FMT he accepted Mahathir’s challenge to publicly debate several important issues.
These included the 1Malaysia Development Bhd (1MDB) and the Bumiputera Malaysia Finance (BMF) scandals, and the RM2.6 billion deposited into Prime Minister Najib Razak’s bank accounts.
A date has yet to be fixed for the debate but Nazri has said that he would be ready to meet his challenger as soon as he returned to Malaysia on Monday from a working visit to Berlin.
Mahathir, who is chairman of the new opposition outfit Parti Pribumi Bersatu Malaysia, however, is scheduled to attend an event in Padang Rengas, Perak, on March 25.
In April last year, a similar debate between Cabinet member Abdul Rahman Dahlan and Penang Chief Minister Lim Guan Eng was called off by broadcasting channel TV3, acting on the advice of police and the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission (MACC) so as not to jeopardise investigations.
At the time, Lim was being investigated for abuse of power over the purchase of a RM2.8 million bungalow in George Town and sale of the Taman Manggis land in Penang.
MACC investigations director Azam Baki and Khalid were quoted as saying that a debate was unwise while investigations were continuing.
Khalid, who led the investigations into 1MDB, said last year that the first phase of the probe, based on the bipartisan Public Accounts Committee (PAC) report, was completed.
In October, Khalid was quoted as saying police needed more time to complete the second phase of its investigation as they were still tracking down several key witnesses across the globe to assist in investigations.