PKR and DAP have both denied receiving funds from the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a US-based outfit which was said to have financed opposition parties for over a decade.
PKR communications director Fahmi Fadzil said neither he nor the party had received funding from NED. He also said he had no information on the matter.
“(Party president) Anwar Ibrahim was incarcerated for a good portion of the last decade, while secretary-general Saifuddin Nasution also really has no information,” he told FMT.
Fahmi also said the claim about the opposition receiving funds from NED “comes up every other year”.
DAP’s international secretary Teo Nie Ching said that as a political party, it did not take any money from these organisations.
“DAP members may have attended some seminars organised by foreign organisations on effective communication, social media literacy, among others, in the past.”
Earlier today, an activist said the ball was in Pakatan Harapan (PH)’s court to explain its alleged dependence on funding from NED.
Kua Kia Soong, who is also a Suaram advisor, said this when commenting on a claim by Daniel Twining, the president of the International Republican Institute (IRI), made three years ago.
Twining said the IRI had been working with opposition parties in Malaysia since 2002 with the help of the NED.
“So, for 15 years, working through NED resources, we worked to strengthen Malaysian opposition parties,” Twining was heard saying in a video that was shared by Kua.
Twining also said that one of the first things the new PH government did after coming to power in 2018 was to freeze Chinese infrastructure investments “because it had opened the books and discovered there was a lot of funny money swishing around”.