?I no­tice that the me­dia are hav­ing a lot of fun in­ter­pret­ing and/or mis­in­ter­pret­ing the state­ments that I made at a re­cent post-Cab­i­net news con­fer­ence.

I was asked by an Ex­press re­porter to com­ment on cer­tain al­le­ga­tions that had been made with re­spect to an al­leged re­la­tion­ship be­tween Calder Hart and the di­rec­tors of a com­pa­ny called CH De­vel­op­ment. I said clear­ly and un­am­bigu­ous­ly that I did not know, nor had I ever met, the di­rec­tors of CH De­vel­op­ment, and there­fore I could not com­ment on the al­le­ga­tions.

Ac­cord­ing­ly, when I said that I did not know these peo­ple, every­body who was present at the news con­fer­ence knew and un­der­stood that I was speak­ing specif­i­cal­ly about the peo­ple as­so­ci­at­ed with the for­ma­tion of CH De­vel­op­ment, and noth­ing else. Notwith­stand­ing this fact, I have no­ticed at­tempts by some com­men­ta­tors to pre­tend that I was speak­ing about the Harts, when it would have been ob­vi­ous that I was not.

On the oth­er hand, I have met some of the di­rec­tors of the Sun­way Group of Com­pa­nies of Malaysia, and if you do an In­ter­net search, you will see that Sun­way is a pub­lic com­pa­ny and is list­ed on the Malaysia Stock Ex­change. Ac­cord­ing­ly, the names of the di­rec­tors of Sun­way are pub­lic knowl­edge and can eas­i­ly be ver­i­fied with­out much dif­fi­cul­ty. I would be grate­ful, there­fore, if�you did not mix up the per­son­al­i­ties in­volved in this mat­ter.

Colm Im­bert

Min­istry of Works and Trans­port