Deepakgate–Musings on the Law and the Lawyerly

Britain’s wartime leader volleyed back: He said he would like to attend the opening night’s programme but official duties prevented him; however, he would be free to attend the second night’s staging, “if there is one.”

Private eye P Balasubramaniam’s lawyer, Americk Singh Sidhu, laid it on copiously when he praised fellow legal practitioner Cecil Abraham’s integrity which he said was a byword among lawyers in the latter’s 40 years of service to the Malaysian Bar.

Americk (right) said he could not conceive that someone of Abraham’s vaunted stature would countenance the drawing up of a false statutory declaration such as carpet trader Deepak Jaikishan had indicated was the case with Balasubramaniam’s second SD that reversed the sensational avowals contained in his first.

Given the gravity of the contents of his first SD, elements of which shed light on the 2006 murder of the Mongolian woman Altantuya Shaariibuu, there was no taking the matter lightly.

Days have passed since Americk unequivocally vouched for Abraham’s probity, but Abraham himself is seemingly unperturbed by the brouhaha, holding his counsel in the face of a hail of imprecations.

The chairperson of one of the panels within the ambit of the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission interjected in the unfolding drama of the contradictory statutory declarations and its attendant issue of responsibility for them by revealing that Abraham had nothing to do with the MACC’s decision to close its investigation of Balasubramaniam’s conflicting declarations. Abraham (left) is a member of the panel tasked with reviewing the MACC’s operational procedures.

Here was a case of weighty individuals rising to speak up for someone who apparently opts for the silence that is not of the kind that purveyor of aphoristic maxims, La Rochefoucauld, held was the mark of a man who distrusts himself.

This silence is possibly the choice of one who seems intent on tiptoeing through a frightful thicket, mindful or not of what the poet Dante said about the hottest places in hell being reserved for those who in times of great moral crisis maintain their neutrality (read: silence).