On Oct 11, 2016, the UM Students’ Representative Council (MPPUM) and Department of Special Affairs (Jasa) organised a 1MDB town hall forum in Universiti Malaya. The speaker was Arul Kanda Kandasamy, the president and executive director of 1MDB. The forum was scheduled to be held at 8pm, but started at 9pm instead.

I am a member of the MPPUM. What happened was that we did not have any meeting for this town hall forum, nor did we plan anything. Oddly, out of nowhere, MPPUM became the ‘co-organiser’ of the town hall forum. Two days before the event, we were instructed to support and publicise this event on social media.

I attended the forum with my friends. I do not intend to reproduce the content of the speech by Arul Kanda or the questions and answers in this article. However, I wish to just point out certain issues on how this forum was conducted.

The official poster of the forum was very inviting; nowhere in the poster was it stated that this forum was exclusively organised for UM students. Despite this, on the night itself, the moderator of the forum announced that the event was only for UM students, and that no recording in any form was allowed.

As far as I know, the personnel on duty prohibited certain people from entering the hall, including Syed Saddiq Syed Abdul Rahman. He remained outside the hall until the event ended.

1MDB is a strategic development company which is wholly-owned by the government of Malaysia. Therefore, as much as I appreciate the exclusivity of the forum, it is only fair that this forum were to be open for all who are interested as the whole fiasco concerns every citizen.

The organiser claimed that the forum was a closed session due to the on-going 1MDB arbitration in London. This argument doesn’t hold water; if secrecy were to be an issue, this forum should not have been organised at all.

What sort of logic were they trying to put in play? It basically means that they couldn’t discuss anything with anyone due to the ongoing arbitration but they could discuss it with 300 students in a hall. This contention is simply preposterous, in my opinion.

The forum should have been held in a larger hall

We have about 10,000 students in UM, but the seats in the venue could only accommodate up to 400 people. The forum should have been held in a larger hall that allows more attendance.

Also, Arul Kanda belaboured our minds with statistics, numbers, and terms that not everyone could understand; though I know he was trying very hard to demystify an esoteric subject. It would be great if there were any economy or business analysts who would be able to question Arul Kanda on his marvelous explanation. But there was none as there were no outsiders allowed.

Arul Kanda’s speech was great, he was very eloquent in his speech. He sounded very convincing. However, when it comes to the question and answer session, he was rather defensive and he also dodged a few hard questions with some excuses. At one point, he conceded that there was financial mismanagement in 1MDB before he was appointed as the executive director (of course he did not elaborate further on that).

During the question and answer session, some photographers were taking photos of those who asked difficult and critical questions to Arul Kanda. On top of this, they were also taking close-up photos even after you went back to your seats; we felt very uneasy.

The town hall forum was heavily one-sided. The booklets distributed to participants contain information which focuses on defending our prime minister and 1MDB as against all the allegations by the US Department of Justice. Undoubtedly, this caused some of us to be rather sceptical towards the content of the booklets.

And the next question is, will UM authorities allow controversial figures like YB Tony Pua or Muhyiddin Yassin to address students on the other side of the 1MDB story?

MARCUS LEE is a final year law student at Universiti Malaya and was recently elected as a student leader in the UM Students Council.