‘ORANG NO.1’ REMARK DRAWS SNIGGERS
Contractor tells how he was engaged to build a storeroom, kitchen cabinets in Najib’s house
ACONTRACTOR who built a storeroom to hang clothes at Datuk Seri Najib Razak’s house yesterday provided some comic relief at the latter’s trial.
The contractor described how he had received a call from one of Najib’s aides, who told him that an orang No. 1 wanted him to build kitchen cabinets and a storeroom at his residence in Jalan Langgak Duta here.
The orang No. 1 was the former prime minister, said the witness, an Indonesian interior designer named Zulkarnain Mohamad.
Zulkarnain, 46, said he received a call from someone named “Encik Amirul” sometime between August and September 2014. He said Amirul wanted him to come over to a house in Jalan Langgak Duta.
“When I got there, I asked him whose house it was. He told me it was rumah orang No. 1… rumah
Najib (the No. 1 man’s house, Najib’s house).
“I told him I was not qualified to work at such a place but he said I could do it as he has seen my work,” he said.
His reference to Najib as orang
No. 1 elicited sniggers in the courtroom, including from the prosecution and defence teams.
Zulkarnain said he proceeded to undertake the work after giving a quotation.
He said the job was completed within three months, even though work had to be halted whenever Najib was at home.
“We were told not to work when he was around... maybe it was because of the noise,” he said, adding that he was also involved in building a police post at the house.
He later confirmed receiving a deposit of RM50,000 and a cheque for RM100,000 on Feb 12, 2014, for the work done.
During cross-examination by Najib’s lead counsel Tan Sri Muhammad Shafee Abdullah, Zulkarnain said he did not know the storeroom was going to be used to hang whose clothes.
He also said he did not know that Najib had another official residence in Putrajaya, but that the latter spent most of his time at the Jalan Langgak Duta house.
Another prosecution witness, a businessman who owns Syarikat MOZ Malaysia Sdn Bhd, testified that he had installed a 12,000litre water tank at Najib’s house in 2015 and was paid RM56,500 for the job.
Mohammad Zakariyya Zearat Khan, 35, said his company was on the panel of Syarikat Bekalan Air Selangor (Syabas) and he had been asked to look into a water issue at Najib’s house.
He also confirmed receiving the payment via an AmBank cheque on Feb 24, 2015.
When asked what he did with the cheque after receiving it, Zakariyya, with an incredulous look on his face and staring straight at the deputy public prosecutor, said: “I banked it in… the cheque has been cleared.”
That elicited laughter all around the courtroom, including from Najib, who was seated in the dock.
Earlier, judge Mohd Nazlan Mohd Ghazali rejected the defence’s preliminary objection against the prosecution’s move to call the two witnesses.
One of Najib’s counsel, Farhan Read, argued that any proposed evidence from the witnesses would have no relation to the charges faced by his client.
He said, therefore, their evidence should be excluded on grounds that it did not pass the legal threshold of relevancy.
However, deputy public prosecutor Datuk V. Sithambaram countered that the court could not prematurely disallow evidence and that the prosecution should be given the liberty to call witnesses.
Attorney-General Tommy Thomas also chipped in, saying the application should be rejected as the prosecution could not be expected to establish its case if it was prevented from calling the witnesses.
“That cannot be right,” he said. The trial will continue on Monday.