PUTRAJAYA – Parti Pejuang Tanah Air (Pejuang) will submit an appeal to Home Minister Datuk Seri Hamzah Zainuddin tomorrow, after its application to register as a political party was rejected by the Registrar of Societies (RoS).
Pejuang pro tem chairman Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad said the party would abide by every law and regulations set to ensure the party’s registration is approved.
“We received information from the RoS that Pejuang’s application for registration has been rejected. We have worked on this for so long; we tried to adhere to all directives, legislation, regulations to register our party but it was rejected,” he told a news conference here today.
Meanwhile, Pejuang secretary-general Datuk Amiruddin Hamzah said according to the RoS, the application did not meet the requirements of Schedule 1 of the Societies Act 1966 and was rejected under Section 7(3)(e) of the same act.
“We have reviewed this and we opined that we have complied with all conditions set in Schedule 1. In fact, we have met with RoS, and they suggested several amendments to the party’s constitution. We resubmitted our application after making the changes,” he explained.
Earlier, Pejuang was reported to have withdrawn its application for leave for judicial review that was filed to challenge the action of the RoS, which had yet to approve the party’s registration, after it was informed of the rejection.
Meanwhile, asked on the cancellation of the Kuala-Lumpur-Singapore High Speed Rail (HSR) project, Dr Mahathir said it was not an important project and Malaysia could wait 20 to 30 more years to implement it.
“Because for this system, we have to travel far to save in terms of time. The project is only 230km and the most amount of time you can save is about 15 minutes.
“For that 15 minutes you have to pay much more money; worse still, the cost of building HSR has gone up to almost RM80 billion. We'll never get back our money,” said the former prime minister.
On January 1, Malaysian Prime Minister Tan Sri Muhyiddin Yassin and his Singapore counterpart Lee Hsien Loong, in a joint statement, said the HSR project had been terminated, as both countries failed to reach an agreement on changes proposed by Malaysia before the project agreement lapsed on December 31, 2020. – Bernama, January 7, 2021
