Monday's expos on the tampering of the Certificate of Legal Practice (CLP) examination results have dealt a severe blow to the integrity of the law profession, said a Gerakan leader today.

"The startling disclosure that papers were leaked and marks adjusted at the whims and fancies of a few people does not augur well for the legal profession in the country," the party's vice-president S Vijayaratnam said in a statement.

"More disturbing are suggestions that this sort of thing has been going on for some time."

The Legal Profession Qualifying Board announced two days ago following a marathon five-hour session that the July CLP results would stand. This decision partly reverses the earlier announcement on Nov 12 that the results for both the examination and supplementary test would be nullified.

Pass rate slides

The marks tampering issue was not raised earlier during the investigation until the board said they would regrade the marks of answer scripts which were allegedly marked up or down by 20 to 30 points.

The move to regrade would result in a sharp drop in the number of students who passed the examination from 232 to119. Some 900 students sat for this year's CLP examination.

The controversy also led some legal experts and politicians to question the relevance of the CLP in today's society. Some claimed that the CLP should not be based on examinations but rather experience gained from an attachment to local law firms which allows the law graduates to get better acquainted with Malaysian laws.

The CLP examination is compulsory for foreign law graduates from England, Wales, Northern Ireland, Australia and New Zealand to qualify to practise as advocates and solicitors in Malaysia.

In previous examinations, the pass rate was about 30 percent.

More lenient admission

Vijayaratnam today called for more lenient admission for foreign legal professionals to practise law in this country.

"Foreign lawyers from the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand and even Singapore will be able to make their services available here and the public will be free to choose," he said.

He also pointed out that certain local firms consult foreign lawyers on the quiet despite laws that prohibit them from doing so.

"In the light of the CLP examination episode which has made local expertise questionable, can we blame anyone for seeking imported professional help?" he said.

Call for arrest

Meanwhile, DAP national chairperson Lim Kit Siang described the recent disclosure by the Qualifying Board as an act of "opening a bigger can of worms".

He questioned why the CLP examination director Khalid Yusoff has not been dismissed and arrested by the police for meddling with the examination results.

"This is not a commendable reflection on the board chairperson who is the Attorney-General, and other board members comprising two judges, the Bar Council chairperson and an academic," he said in a statement.

The six-member board is made up of AG Ainum Mohamed Saaid, Federal Court judge Siti Norma Yaakob, High Court judge Abdul Wahab Patail, chief registrar of Federal Court Abdul Wahab Said Ahmad, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia Assoc Prof Shamsuddin Suhor and Bar Council chairperson Mah Weng Kwai.

Typists helped

Yesterday, asked about who was responsible for the mark discrepancies, Ainum said, "We believe it is the director himself. His typists assisted him in entering the marks into the master result sheet."

Lim also demanded an explanation from the board as to why they only dealt with scripts which were marked up but not those marked down.

"The regraded results showed only adjustments of scripts which were marked up, those who deserved to pass but whose results had been tampered with continue to fail," he said.

He again stressed that a Royal Commission of Inquiry should be set up by Parliament to look into the conduct of the CLP examination and the mark-tampering scandal.