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KUALA LUMPUR, May 11 — Datuk Seri Gopal Sri Ram is expected to appear personally in the High Court here on June 3 to argue against Datin Seri Rosmah Mansor’s application to remove him as the lead prosecutor in her corruption trial involving millions of ringgit of alleged bribes, the prosecution said today.
Last week, Rosmah had filed two applications at the High Court in Kuala Lumpur seeking to nullify her entire trial, in her bid to be acquitted and seeking once again to remove Sri Ram as the lead prosecutor in this trial.
These two applications were filed on May 6, just about a month before Rosmah is set to begin her defence in the trial on June 9.
Today was the case management of these two applications before High Court judge Mohamed Zaini Mazlan, the same judge who is presiding over Rosmah’s trial.
The judge today decided that he will hear the two applications simultaneously on June 3, in order to have time to decide on the applications before the scheduled dates for Rosmah’s defence from June 9 onwards.
Deputy public prosecutor Mohamad Mustaffa P. Kunyalam today informed the court that Sri Ram would lead the prosecution in arguing against Rosmah’s two applications during the June 3 hearing.
“Datuk Seri Gopal Sri Ram himself will lead the submissions because he said this affects him personally, so he will come and submit, that is my instruction,” he told the court.
This was however met with strong objections by Rosmah’s team of lawyers, who claimed Sri Ram could not come and argue on the application seeking to remove him as the lead prosecutor or to have any role in Rosmah’s prosecution.
Rosmah’s lawyer Datuk Jagjit Singh claimed: “We’ll be objecting, you cannot argue your own cause, although this is not a judge in his own cause, it affects him personally. It becomes a mockery.”
Jagjit further claimed that this was “highly improper and coming from an ex-judge, he should know better”.
Mustaffa however noted that there was already precedent which would allow Sri Ram to appear in court to lead the prosecution in arguing against Rosmah’s applications, pointing out that private lawyer Tan Sri Muhammad Shafee Abdullah was previously allowed to present arguments in court against a challenge to his appointment as prosecutor in Anwar’s Sodomy II case.
“We are guided by previous cases such as Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim’s case, Shafee was asked to be disqualified, he submitted on his own, there was no issue, it was decided by a Federal Court judge,” Mustaffa said.
Zaini did not make any decision today on whether Sri Ram would be allowed to appear in court to lead the prosecution in arguing the two applications, but instead asked for both the prosecution and Rosmah’s lawyers to discuss and work on this matter, as he did not want technical issues to “derail” the two applications.
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from Malay Mail - Malaysia
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