Clare denies receiving fund from Malaysia

PETALING JAYA: Sarawak Report (SR) founder Clare Rewcastle-Brown has denied receiving any funding from very powerful people in Malaysia as per Lester Melanyi's claim.
In an immediate response to Melanyi's accusation, Clare said Radio Free Sarawak (RFS) is largely funded by a reputable European foundation which focuses on rainforest issues and that she sustained her web hosting costs for both sites from that source.
"We also receive a steady and welcome stream of mainly small donations from people who support our work through our site's donation page, and those dozens of small donations add up very helpfully to cover some of the expenses we have incurred," she told theSun.
"For the past year, I have received a salary for my work at RFS and SR, which has fallen below the level of taxable income in the UK. Prior to that I worked on the project entirely unpaid for over four years," she added.
On Melanyi's call for her to show her Sarawak Report accounts, she said: "We publish our accounts the normal way and these are available at Companies House." (Companies House is the United Kingdom's registrar of companies and is an executive agency and trading fund of the British Government.)
She also confirmed that she had not fabricated any documents and pointed that Melanyi's accusations were also baseless.
"Lester has not provided a single shred of evidence to back his nonsense claims compared to the detailed research that I have
undertaken for years on the problems besetting Malaysia," she said.
She added that Melanyi was also only a volunteer in RFS for four months, but was released from the team after the 2011 state elections because "he was idle and deceitful and I learnt he was also working for a third party who was trying to spy on our operation".
"He knows that I was not being paid at that time and it is ironic that the person who has made money out of Sarawak Report has been Lester Melanyi, who never wrote a single word of any of it.
"This is because he is the one who is now accepting ill-gotten bribes to defame me and my blog, having had nothing to do with even RFS for years," she added.
Melanyi, who was former Sarawak Tribune editor, claimed today that Clare was receiving funding from very powerful people in Malaysia.
"She keeps talking about money that people say went into the prime minister's account, but never talks about the money she receives.
"Why? If Clare is such a believer in transparency, she should provide the Sarawak Report accounts and show us where her funding comes from.
"But she cant do this because if she did, we would find out who her real boss is," he said in a statement.