SHAH ALAM, August 2: The action of the Registrar of Societies (ROS) ordering DAP to hold a re-election of the DAP Central Executive Committee (CEC) is seen as denying the rights of the 753 delegates who attended the congress last December.
DAP Parliamentary Chief, Lim Kit Siang, in a statement, challenged the ROS Director General, Datuk Abdul Rahman Othman stating the real reason why the order was issued.
“The Umno/BN War Room has invested a lot of resources, personnel and tens of million over the past six months to implement the two-point strategy in effort to discredit and destroy DAP.
“They are also spreading lies that DAP is funding the Red Bean Army which comprises of 3,000 cybertroopers with provisions between RM100 million to RM1 billion over the past six years to taint the personalities of Umno/BN leaders.
“It also created a false story about irregularities in the election of the CEC during the DAP Congress last December,” said Kit Siang who is also the Member of Parliament for Gelang Patah.
Umno/BN claimed that all 753 DAP delegates were not informed about the DAP Congress last December as stipulated in the party constitution, this denying their rights to attend the congress and elect members of the CEC.
“The issue was also used to accuse DAP as anti-Indian because most of the 753 delegates were from the Indian community and because of that, they were discriminated against and denied the right to attend the Congress and vote during the CEC election.
“Both allegations are totally inaccurate because 71 of the delegates attended the Party Congress (to meet the quorum, only 25 percent of the members were eligible to be delegates) from the total 2,576 delegates.
“This is a high attendance record and it is not true is there are parties claiming that the absence of delegations is due to the conspiracy mobilised by not issuing notices,” he said adding that if that reason is used, the validity of all political parties or organisations can be disputed.
Kit Siang also said that DAP cooperated well by providing evidence to the ROS that the congress notice was given to all delegates as required by the party constitution, while delegates of Indian descent who were not present accounted for only 100 people and not 700 as claimed by Umno/BN.
What more regrettable, claimed Kit Siang, is that Umno/BN spread wild accusations that the DAP CEC election was joined by phantom delegates, which was 300 people initially, but then increased to 547 people.
“Apart from the two lies, the reason given by the ROS was a small disturbance involving computers during the DAP Congress, where the interference did not lead to errors of calculation or tabulation of votes, instead it was only at the level of announcement of results, when a candidate, Vincent Wu, was announced as the winner, when the real winner was Zairil Khir Johari.
“The error was corrected and DAP has given a full explanation of the error to the ROS officers by submitting all documents and related materials,” said Kit Siang.