Striking out MAF Lawsuit 11th June 2012

KUALA LUMPUR: The government has applied to the High Court here to reject a suit filed by a group of Malaysian Armed Forces (ATM) retirees on the grounds that it was unreasonable and an abuse of court process. Capt (R) Tengku Zainal Abidin Tengku Yusoff, 58, had filed the suit against the government on Jan 20, on behalf of 403 active and retired officers ranging from second lieutenants to generals. Senior federal counsel Shamsul Bolhassan, who is representing six Malaysian Prime Ministers, the Chief Secretary to the Government and several government parties filed the application on April 19. The government further submitted that the plaintiff had failed to identify the 403 officers and that the application has exceeded the statute of limitation. The group have named former Singapore Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, six Malaysian Prime Ministers from Tunku Abdul Rahman Putra Al-Haj to Datuk Seri Najib Razak and the Chief Secretary to the Government as defendants. Also named as defendants were Defence Ministers, from the time of Tun Abdul Razak Hussein to the present, Datuk Seri Ahmad Zahid Hamidi, the Defence Secretary General, Government of Malaysia and the Government of the Republic of Singapore. In their statement of claim, the plaintiffs claimed that the first to sixth prime ministers and chief secretary to the government had cheated, conspired and abused their powers to demean the ATM officers by reducing their basic salary and officers' allowance from 1963 to the present. They are seeking among others, a declaration that the Cabinet's decision in 1963 which excluded the ATM from the Special Commission formed to review the salary scale and service for all civil sectors as wrong and unlawful. Meanwhile, Tengku Zainal Abidin told reporters outside the court that the summons has been served to Lee Kuan Yew and the Singapore Government on May 3. Judicial Commissioner Vazeer Alam Mydin presided and fixed case management for June 11. - Bernama