Ismail Sabri’s new Environment Minister, Tuan Ibrahim (a cleric from the PAS Islamic extremist party), pitched up a week late to the COP Climate Conference in Glasgow on Monday just as his country had attracted attention amongst delegates, once again for all the wrong reasons.

According to a devastating analysis by the Washington Post, Malaysia tops the chart for ‘hot air’ environment claims from countries who have submitted suspect emissions reports to the UN on their contribution to global greenhouse gases.

This is the embarrassing Instagram post the paper used to promote their investigation:

“Malaysia’s latest catalogue of its greenhouse gas emissions to the United Nations reads like a report from a parallel universe. The 285-page document suggests that Malaysia’s trees are absorbing carbon four times faster than similar forests in neighboring Indonesia.
The surprising claim has allowed the country to subtract over 243 million tons of carbon dioxide from its 2016 inventory — slashing 73 percent of emissions from its bottom line.”

So, once again, this Malaysian coup coalition, made up of the parties who lost the last election on a wave of public disgust, are telling themselves and anyone who will listen a torrent of lies to excuse their failings and rank criminality.

Likewise, according to Malaysian commissioned Greenwash, over 60% of the country remains forested and the mass roll out of oil palm and other agro-forestry plantations are somehow beneficial to the environment. Neither is true and nor are the return of wild narratives about UMNO’s innocence over 1MDB.

In just the latest attempt to re-write documented history (and indeed his own admission when paying a money-laundering fine of $60 million to the US authorities) Najib’s son Riza has today sought to claim that the millions stolen from 1MDB to fund his Hollywood movies were loans from Saudi princes after all!

Apart from anything else, this is a stunning evolution on the original lie Riza told which was that the money came from the UAE instead!

The only people who believe a word of these ever-changing denials of the truth are those who for their self-interest want to believe the government propaganda machine which churned out lies for years under UMNO and which is now back churning out the same lies for the PN 2.0 successor regime fronted by Ismail Sabri for the same bunch of UMNO kleptocrats.

Just yesterday Najib secured the return of a billion ringgit worth of cash and items seized from his various properties before he was charged (and convicted) of stealing from 1MDB, on the grounds that the judge, whilst acknowledging the ex-PM could provide no valid explanation for such wealth, considered the prosecution had not proved the origin was 1MDB.

We are assured that judgements such as this have nothing to do with the return of UMNO to executive power, despite the claims by the former PM whom they elbowed aside (Mahiaddin Yassin) that the party would indeed pressure the judiciary to save their skins and return their loot.

So no surprise that whilst wife Rosmah enjoys the return of 274 Hermes handbags plus cash and jewellery, her husband is broadcasting far and wide that the couple were innocent all along with regard to their fantastic horde of unexplained wealth and that 1MDB was a plot to discredit them by evil journalists in league with Jho Low.

With UMNO’s hands back upon the levers of power excuse after excuse is being made to drop prosecutions and abandon law suits against their own crooked politicians, despite the  continuing 1MDB-related prosecutions by this very government against financial institutions and other bodies who were collaborating with the self-same politicians to process the stolen cash.

The creation of contorted Truth Bubbles by oppressive regimes to justify their criminal acts to a domestic audience is nothing new, of course. Under the Soviet regime Communist propaganda upturned the truth as does every closed and oppressive regime that seeks to convince its intimidated and exploited population that they are the luckiest people on the planet.

Thanks to the growing official intimidation against ‘fake news’, misuse of Covid crackdowns and barrage of such self-serving UMNO propaganda, Malaysia is now likewise in the grip of deliberate disinformation backed by their own government.

However, lying to their own people is one thing. Malaysia will not get away with lying to other countries and the global media about climate change nor about Najib’s cock and bull narratives over 1MDB.

The apparent last minute decision by the Sabri government to send a minister to the global climate gathering, belatedly to sign up to the 2030 ‘Zero Deforestation Pledge’, appears to have been motivated by a sudden realisation that there might be cash in the process for clever beggars.

But with its record on the truth Malaysia will get little shrift.