KUALA LUMPUR – Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad said he decided on Tan Sri Tommy Thomas for the country’s top legal post because he thought it was a good thing that the attorney-general was not a Malay.
Mahathir said he had appointed Thomas as he was disillusioned with the former Malay AGs, who had been prepared to obey former prime minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak blindly.
This, he said, was despite knowing the Malays would be opposed to it.
The former prime minister said the Malay AGs had not been true to their profession.
“I was prepared to face criticisms from the Malays, and I could not stop them,” he said.
Mahathir broke his silence today after being on the receiving end of several hard-hitting comments by Thomas in his newly launched memoir, My Story: Justice in the Wilderness.
He said he read with shock excerpts of him from Thomas’ book, which among other things claimed the former had wanted him to resign just a day after being appointed as the AG.
Thomas had said the decision was due to the scale and magnitude of the Malay opposition to his appointment, and that Mahathir only changed his mind after Islamist party PAS issued a statement saying they had no objection.
In his blog post, Mahathir also reminded Thomas that it was him who defended the ex-AG when others were against him.
He said that he had also accepted Thomas’ explanation when the latter had dropped all 34 charges against the 12 accused of involvement with Sri Lanka’s Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, and had received the wrath of the Malays as a result.
Despite all this, Mahathir said he still got on quite well with Tommy when he was the AG.
“I trusted him and defended him when the Malays condemned him,” he said.
Mahathir said he even recommended Thomas for a Tan Sri title as his term was nearing its end, a title later accorded by Yang di-Pertuan Agong Al-Sultan Abdullah Ri’ayatuddin Al-Mustafa Billah Shah on September 9, 2019.
Mahathir however said he decided then not to extend Thomas’ term, which would have expired in June 2020, as the elder statesman had taken “so much bashing because of him”.
Thomas resigned as AG on February 28, 2020 following the collapse of the Pakatan Harapan government. – The Vibes, February 3, 2021
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