“Any funds received from OSF by anyone at the university was probably through unofficial channels,” he said, adding that the alleged funding could have come as private grants to individual lecturers or researchers.
“This was without the knowledge of the university management,” Kadim told the Borneo Post.
He was commenting on a OSF 2014 Report which lists Unimas as a fund recipient.
For any fund that Unimas receives, he said, the university will determine the source and its purpose.
“We check everything,” he said. “We don’t simply accept any offer of funds or grants.”
As far as Kadim was concerned, the university has not received any grant or financial aid from OSF.
“We have nothing to do with OSF,” he reiterated. “We are shocked by the allegation (OSF 2014 Report).”
Kadim does not rule out the possibility that some lecturers might be engaged in certain activities outside the university. He cited their participation in NGOs, for example, as one possibility.
The university, he said, does not monitor what lecturers do with their own time.
Under normal circumstance, said Kadim in qualifying his statement, “we don’t check on them”.
“They are lecturers,” he pointed out. “We have to trust them.”
However, he conceded that lecturers at government-owned universities were also public servants and therefore bound by rules and regulations governing the civil service.
“They should know the rules and regulations, and how to behave,” he said.
According to media reports quoting Deputy Prime Minister Ahmad Zahid Hamidi, Soros has been funding local organisations. It’s feared that such backing might be a bid to influence the next General Election.
Zahid agreed the question was not which organisations in Malaysia were being funded by OSF or why, but whether foreigners were involved in local politics.
He wants the funding to be investigated empirically, “by observation and scientific experimentation”.
Unimas aside, according to reports, others funded by OSF in Malaysia include the following: C4 Malaysia, Empowerment Pusat Kesedaran Komuniti, Islamic Renaissance Front, Merdeka Centre for Opinion Research, Penang Institute, Suara Rakyat Malaysia (Suaram), Citizen Journalists Malaysia (Sabah) and Committee For Free Election (Comfrel).