PETALING JAYA: Datuk Seri Najib Razak has given thumbs up after his judicial review to dispute the existence of an addendum by the former Yang di-Pertuan Agong was reinstated by the Court of Appeal today.
Najib claims the addendum order allegedly allowed him to serve his remaining prison sentence under house arrest.
His lawyer Tan Sri Muhammad Shafee Abdullah said Najib was happy and relieved that the court acknowledged elements of injustice in the case, the New Straits Times reported.
“From afar I saw he gave his thumbs up. He is hoping to see and to start breathing again,“ he was quoted as saying.
In the ex-PM’s Facebook post, Najib said: “So grateful. Alhamdulillah. Today we take another step forward.”
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Earlier today, the appellate court granted Najib permission to dispute the existence of the house arrest addendum and allowed him to adduce additional affidavits to back his application.
Judge Datuk Seri Mohd Firuz Jaffril who chaired the panel, reportedly said the evidence in question was not available when the appellant who, at first, filed the leave to initiate the judicial review before the High Court in 2024.
Firuz asserted that due diligence must be exercised to make sure the evidence would influence the case outcome and noted that the applicant wrote to the six respondents to confirm the addendum’s existence but did not get a response.
He added that the applicant who received the alleged addendum had sought the consent of the Sultan of Pahang to use the document in the judicial review application received on December 20 2024.
The Court of Appeal had also ordered the remittance of the case back to the High Court for the hearing of a judicial review application with a firm basis while one of the judges in a minority decision pointed out the lower court did not make an appealable error in ruling that the evidence presented was hearsay.
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Furthermore, the matter of adducing additional evidence by Najib’s eldest son, Datuk Mohamad Nizar, the judge said his failure to get the document “could not be concluded”, as quoted, as he often had meetings with the Pahang Sultan.
The date for the case management has been fixed for January 13.
Last year, the Court of Appeal reversed the High Court’s ruling which previously dismissed Najib’s application for the judicial review.
He is seeking a mandamus order to compel the respondents to respond and verify the alleged addendum’s existence dated back to January 29 2024.
Najib is serving a six-year prison sentence after his conviction of misappropriating RM42 million from SRC International Sdn Bhd as of now.
Before this, he was sentenced to 12 years in jail and was imposed a fine of RM210 million by the High Court and the verdict was upheld by the Federal Court and Court of Appeal but the sentence was halved with the fine reduced to only RM50 million after his petition for a royal pardon on September 2 2022.
