Malaysia’s former finance minister Lim Guan Eng was charged on Friday with corruption over a 1.5 billion undersea tunnel project, with his party slamming the move as political persecution by the new government.<\/p>\n
Lim, who was part of a reformist government ousted in a political coup in March, pleaded not guilty to a charge of soliciting 10% of potential profits in 2011 as a bribe for the contract. He was detained late Thursday by the anti-corruption agency after they summoned him for questioning over the project in northern Penang state.<\/p>\n
The project was approved during Lim’s tenure as Penang chief minister from 2008-2018, before he became Malaysia’s finance minister. The 7.2 kilometre (4.5 miles) tunnel project from Penang island to peninsular Malaysia includes several highways and is to be funded through a land swap of reclaimed prime land.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Malaysia’s former finance minister Lim Guan Eng was charged on Friday with corruption over a 1.5 billion undersea tunnel project, with his party slamming the move as political persecution by the new government. Lim, who was part of a reformist government ousted in a political coup in March, pleaded not guilty to a charge of soliciting 10% of potential profits in 2011 as a bribe for the contract. He was detained late Thursday by the anti-corruption agency after they summoned him for questioning over the project in northern Penang state. The project was approved during Lim’s tenure as Penang chief […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":40,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[130,213,144],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-366675","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-newspapers","category-roads-the-pioneer","category-the-pioneer"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/366675","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/40"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=366675"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/366675\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=366675"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=366675"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=366675"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}