Aman Palestin: Explaining Misuse of Funds Allegations

Update 1/2/2024: Aman Palestin has just filed for leave for a judicial review – essentially asking the courts to do a review – which seeks to cancel MACC’s freeze on 11 of its bank accounts. They’ve also asked for an interim order to be granted to withdraw RM770,108.40 every month for its operations and employees’ pay, among others.

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A few months ago, one of Malaysia’s most well-known charities – Aman Palestin – was raided by the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission (MACC), and some allegations about the charity organization came to light:

• Misappropriation of a jawdropping RM70 million public funds
• Used donation money to buy gold, properties and other assets
• Their operating and management fees (allegedly) exceeded RM400,000 per month

That’s… fair a bit to swallow for average people like you and I, and doubly so for those of y’all who have donated to Aman Palestin in the past, cuz as far as any of us knew, they seemed pretty legit. But the fact is, their finances have been sus for a while now.

Before we dive into the reports and the numbers, though…

 

Who or what is Aman Palestin?

Like we mentioned above, they’re a charity organization, and they were established in 2004 with the aim of ‘helping and distributing aid to Palestine’, with their founder being this one dude, Abdullah Zaik Abdul Rahman:

And to be fair to Aman Palestin, they’ve done a lot in that regard.

In 2009, for example, they raised RM777,000 from a buka puasa event that went towards poor families and orphans in Gaza and Lebanon. Then in 2015, they sponsored three ambulances and a bulldozer worth almost RM1 million to help with reconstruction projects again in Gaza.

Those are just two instances of all the money, food, equipment and other forms of aid they’ve contributed to Palestine, and just to illustrate how successful they are as a charity, the NGO raised RM114 million in donations in 2021.

So yeah, it’s safe to say that Aman Palestin has done what they set out to do on the surface, but here’s one of the problems with the NGO…

 

They take 30% of their donations as management fees

A charity organization, like any other company, runs on money. You can’t pay for stationery, equipment, advertising and manpower with goodwill alone after all, which is why charity NGOs take some of the money from donations as operating costs. Most NGOs we looked up take between 2% and 20% as management fees.

And according to an article by The Star, MACC found from Aman Palestin’s account books that operations and management fees amounted to over RM400,000 per month. That’s not an eye-popping amount, but after we looked through Aman Palestin’s most recent audit report from 2021…

They appear to have taken 30% (about RM34 million) of their donations (about RM114 million) as management fees. That maths out to more than RM2,830,000 per month.

That’s not illegal or anything, but:

1. Why the discrepancy? (RM400,000~ per month versus RM2,830,000~ per month); and
2. Taking 30% from your donations as management fees is pretty high, if we go by industry standards

It’s a little strange considering how Aman Palestin themselves used to take 12% of their donations in 2014 and 20% in 2015 as management fees.

Even if you can chalk all that talk about the increase in management fees as a byproduct of inflation, there’s still the matter of how…

 

Aman Palestin have been hush-hush about their finances

Something not many people know about Aman Palestin is that they are registered with our Suruhanjaya Syarikat Malaysia (SSM) as a non-profit organization.

That’s not really an issue, cuz charitable NGOs can either be formed under the Registrar of Societies, the Prime Minister’s Department, or SSM. There’s a bunch of other foundations that are also registered under SSM, like Yayasan Selangor, Yayasan Palan and Yayasan Akalbudi.

The problem comes in when these charitable NGOs that are supposed to submit regular audit reports to SSM fail to do so, like in Aman Palestin’s case… on two occasions as far as we know.

2021

• Local netizens found out that Aman Palestin didn’t submit their audit reports from 2016 to 2019, and Aman Palestin’s CEO at the time had to come out to clarify that they’ve always submitted the reports to Aman Palestin since 2007. It’s just that they’ve changed auditors in 2016 and 2017 which caused a delay in completing those reports, and SSM knew about this.

2022

• Facebook user, Aliff Ahmad shared a post saying that the organization’s latest audit report was submitted in 2019. And now that we’re in 2024, we looked up Aman Palestin on the SSM website, and their last report was submitted in 2021, leading us to wonder where the 2022 report was. Maybe they had another change in auditors, who knows.

Not updating their audit reports is one thing, but it doesn’t help Aman Palestin’s case when they don’t make their audit reports or annual reports publicly available. MyCare, another local charity, has multiple pools of donations going to Palestine, and you can actually find ALL their audit reports on their website.

The same goes to Islamic Relief, a global charity that also has operations in Malaysia. They’ve got annual reports that detail the amount of donations they get, and where the money goes to, including how much they use for advertising, office equipment, website maintenance, et cetera, in the form of management fees.

And maybe, just maybe, one of the reasons why they keep their finances so opaque is that…

 

 

Aman Palestine might be paying their own people for their services

Okay, that probably sounds a bit confusing, so let us explain. Remember Abdullah Zaik Abdul Rahman? We talked about him earlier – he was the founder of Aman Palestin, and is currently its chairperson. He was also the first president of Ikatan Muslimin Malaysia (ISMA), an ultraconvervative NGO that caters to the wellbeing of Malay-Muslims. He’s not the only one who has ties with ISMA; one of Aman Palestin’s directors, Zaini Awang, is an ISMA leader, and its advisor, Zainur Rashid, used to be ISMA’s vice president.

But why’s that relevant to the discussion? Well, Aman Palestin, with its connection to ISMA through its upper level management, might be paying ISMA affiliated companies for their services.

See, a ‘well-placed source’ told The Star that some of Aman Palestin’s expenditure went to – among other things like gold and properties – a media agency. And Aliff Ahmad, the netizen we mentioned above, suspects it to be one of two companies affiliated with ISMA: Kerengga Merah Sdn. Bhd and Media ISMA Sdn. Bhd, cuz Norzila Bt Baharin, a director of both these companies, used to be the Naib Presiden ISMA Wanita.

To be fair to Aman Palestin, these are only speculations on the part of a netizen, but we wouldn’t be surprised if they actually contracted these companies for their services.

And since nothing super concrete has been revealed by MACC yet…

 

We contacted two of Aman Palestin’s upper level-management staff, but…

…we didn’t get any responses to our questions, unfortunately. It could be that they were advised to stay silent while investigations are underway, we’re not entirely sure.

What we are sure of is that charity NGOs should be transparent with their finances – how much money they’ve received in donations, where their money goes, et cetera, and that’s especially true for NGOs that receive HUGE sums of money every year. That’s only fair to nice Malaysians who decided to donate their hard earned cash to what they believed was a good cause. None of us donate money just to see it lining the pockets of a few fat cats instead of going to the needy, yeah?