Following today’s reveal that The Edge offered (but did not pay) former PetroSaudi executive Xavier Andre Justo USD2 million (RM7.62 million) for leaked documents detailing money laundering in sovereign development fund 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB), the Home Ministry has suspended the publishing license of the print editions of The Edge Weekly and The Edge Financial Daily for three months.
The Edge Media Group, which owns both newspapers and the online news outlet The Malaysian Insider, cited a Home Ministry letter ordering the company to stop publishing the financial newspapers, or risk having their publishing permits withdrawn outright.
“KDN stated that the two publications’ reporting of 1MDB were ‘prejudicial or likely to be prejudicial to public order, security or likely to alarm public opinion or is likely to be prejudicial to public and national interest’,” the company said today in a statement.
The Edge‘s online counterparts, theedgemarkets.com and the lifetyle-oriented edgy.my do not seem to be subject to the same suspension order at this time.
The various editions of The Edge have courted federal ire of late with their coverage of alleged misconduct within 1MDB, which is wholly owned by the Finance Ministry. On Monday, it ran a report detailing how local billionaire Jho Low and two PetroSaudi bosses, Tarek Obaid and Patrick Mahony, had cheated 1MDB (and the people of Malaysia, who bankrolled the company with their tax ringgit) of some RM6.9 billion from 2009 to 2011.
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