Discontinuance of charges against Mahiaddin underscores urgency of prosecutorial reform

Prosecutorial decisions to discontinue high-profile corruption cases continue to be made in Malaysia without any published criteria and without any public duty to give reasons.

This is a gap civil society organisations have repeatedly flagged as untenable. That gap was on full display on 15 September, when the prosecution applied to discontinue four charges against former prime minister Mahiaddin Yasin connected to Bukhary Equity Sdn Bhd – one count of using his position to solicit RM200m in gratification and three related money-laundering charges – under section 254(1) of the Criminal Procedure Code.

The High Court, exercising its discretion, went further and acquitted him outright.

Mahiaddin continues to face three separate charges of abuse of position said to involve RM25.3m in the same Jana Wibawa matter.

The Attorney General’s Chambers has since said that the charges were dropped following an assessment of the evidence and the litigation risks involved.

That explanation was not put to the court for evaluation, and remains too general to answer the seriousness of the charges.

More importantly, it does not explain why the prosecution now reaches a different conclusion than the one it defended as recently as October 2025, when it rejected Mahiaddin’s own representations to drop these very charges. See here and here.

Given the state of affairs now, rebuilding public trust requires more than that, as this is not an isolated case.

In September 2023, Umno president and Deputy PM Zahid Hamidi was granted a discharge not amounting to acquittal on all 47 charges of criminal breach of trust, corruption and money laundering from his Yayasan Akalbudi foundation.

In January 2026, the chambers went further and declared the matter permanently closed, citing a review that found the evidence insufficient to sustain a prosecution.

Former Prime Minister Najib Razak’s other corruption trials have followed a comparable course.

Each time a case of this scale ends this way, without a transparent, contemporaneous explanation, the perception that prosecutorial outcomes track political standing rather than the law is left to linger, and public trust in the prosecution service pays the price.

This is precisely the pattern of discretion that we, the undersigned, have repeatedly warned cannot be exercised behind closed doors.

The public has no way of knowing why a case, once brought, is later allowed to be withdrawn, because the same office that decides to charge also decides, on its own and without published criteria, when to stop.

That silence is what erodes public confidence. The problem arises from the absence of any framework within which the public can judge whether that outcome was reached on the law and the evidence, or on other grounds.

We therefore call on the Attorney General’s Chambers and the government to:

• Publicly explain the withdrawl: The Attorney General’s Chambers should set out, in specific and substantive terms, the evidential or legal basis for discontinuing the four Bukhary Equity charges. Where a decision to discontinue a high-profile prosecution midway through trial is made, the public interest in an accountable explanation is at its highest, not its lowest.
• Publish the prosecution guidelines: The chambers should release and make public the prosecutorial guidelines governing charging and discontinuance decisions, including the criteria applied when the prosecution seeks a discharge not amounting to acquittal or otherwise withdraws charges. Malaysia’s prosecutorial discretion has operated for decades without any published framework against which individual decisions can be measured. This is no longer tenable, particularly where the subject of a discontinued prosecution is a former head of government.
• Commit, in clear and public terms, to completing the constitutional separation of the attorney general and public prosecutor roles and its enabling legislation before Parliament is dissolved for the next general election. The Constitution (Amendment) (No 2) Bill 2026 has been before Parliament for some time. Its purpose, ie separating the office of attorney general from that of public prosecutor, and pairing that separation with statutory accountability mechanisms such as published prosecutorial guidelines, annual reporting and a code of conduct, goes directly to the concerns this case raises. Without both the constitutional amendment and its enabling act in force before dissolution, the risk is that the current term ends exactly as it began with prosecutorial decisions of this consequence made and unmade with no public reasoning and no legal duty to give one. A change of government after the next general election should not be an occasion for further charges to be quietly withdrawn under the same unaccountable arrangement.

The credibility of Malaysia’s anti-corruption architecture depends on the public being able to see that prosecutorial decisions – to charge, to conduct, or to discontinue – are made on consistent, disclosed criteria applied equally regardless of the accused’s political standing.

We reiterate that this is a structural problem requiring a structural remedy, and urge for the government to treat the completion of reform to separate the attorney general and public prosecutor roles in this parliamentary term, as a matter of institutional necessity rather than political convenience.

Issued by:

1. Project Stability and Accountability for Malaysia (Projek Sama)
2. Coalition for Clean and Fair Elections (Bersih)
3. Institute for Democracy and Economic Affairs (Ideas)
4. The Center to Combat Corruption and Cronyism (C4 Center)
5. Rasuah Busters

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