Zaid Ibrahim a turncoat? Why UMNO’s biggest critic became Najib’s main lawyer

About a week ago, an update to one of Najib’s court cases sent some people into a frenzy. Basically, Najib changed lawyers for his SRC International case, swapping out Tan Sri Muhammad Shafee Abdullah – who had handled his cases so far – for Datuk Mohd Zaid Ibrahim.

Now, while some are saying that this is yet another delaying tactic – change lawyer, need to postpone hearing so that new team can catch up la – perhaps the biggest issue people had with this news was who the new lawyer is. Isn’t Zaid Ibrahim a politician? Is he switching sides?

So if you’ve never heard of Zaid Ibrahim before, perhaps the most common things people would say about him is that…

He was known as a katak politician with no principles

If nothing else, Zaid Ibrahim was famously known as a politician who jumped parties a lot in his career, to the point that one senior journalist said that…

“Keeping track of the changes to his stances and party affiliations over the years has been a dizzying and unedifying business,” – Terrence Netto, in a letter to FMT.

We actually tried to keep track though, and wrote a pretty detailed article about it back in 2017. But in case you don’t want to read the whole article, here’s the tl;dr:

• He joined UMNO in 2000, and became Kota Bharu UMNO division chief the next year. UMNO’s disciplinary board later charged him of money politics and found him guilty. He questioned the board’s authority, which got him suspended for 18 months, prevented him from re-taking the division chief position, and prevented him from re-running as MP.
• Despite his unpopularity, he was later made Law Minister in 2008. Shortly after, he resigned in protest over the government’s arrest of Teresa Kok, Raja Petra Kamarudin, and reporter Tan Hoon Cheng under the ISA.
• He later got sacked from UMNO because someone saw him going to a PKR annual congress. Six months after that, he announced his membership with PKR. He quit PKR a year later due to his dissatisfaction with the party though, accusing Anwar/Azmin as the reason behind all the party’s problems.
• Less than a month later, he started his own political party called Kesejahteraan Insan Tanah Air (KITA), a multi-racial, independent party which later failed and got dissolved.
• He later joined DAP in 2017, believing that DAP can contribute towards solving Malaysia’s problem.

Wah liao. Perhaps because of this history of hopping, people were quick to label him as having no principles when it was announced that he would be defending Najib in the SRC International case, as in the past Zaid Ibrahim was very vocal about his criticism of Najib.

For example, back in 2008, Zaid made a speech which, among other things, implored for the Agong to not appoint Najib as the Prime Minister, citing the controversial purchase of the Scorpene submarines and the murder of Altantuya Shaariibuu. In 2015, he was charged (and later acquitted) for making an offensive statement while calling for Najib’s resignation.

And in 2016, he tried filing a judicial review to challenge the then AG Apandi Ali’s decision to not charge Najib for the SRC International case and the RM2.6 billion donations. That got rejected, but the point here is that Zaid Ibrahim hadn’t exactly been Najib’s biggest supporter, so him being Najib’s lawyer now invited accusations of flakiness on his behalf.

However, if we look closer at the rapidly swinging needle that is his loyalty, the base seems to be connected firmly to a pivoting point…

Zaid Ibrahim may only be loyal to his idea of justice

After looking at what had been published about his previous actions as well as his past Tweets, it seems that Zaid Ibrahim’s loyalty is not towards political leaders or parties, but rather a concept: his idea of law and justice.

Looking at his history with this idea in mind, his actions would make sense: he called out politicians from both sides in his Tweets whenever he felt injustice is happening, he jumped to parties that he believed can serve people the best, and perhaps most prominently, he resigned from being a minister when he believed that the law had been abused.

“…a Minister must hold to principles, particularly if he is the minister responsible for legal affairs. A Minister’s job is to do the best for the people and the country. When Government action deviates from his principles, the minister must resign.” – from Zaid Ibrahim’s book, I, Too, Am Malay.

Getting back to recent news, quite a few eyebrows were raised when Zaid revealed that although he was critical of Najib and his role in 1MDB in the past, he now believes that Najib was not the mastermind after following the cases. But the question raised by him wasn’t whether Najib was free of guilt, but rather the disproportionate attention given to Najib, when so many other parties are just as guilty.

“It appears that the anger is just on one person – Najib. Is there no anger as to why Jho Low is still not found? … Is there no anger towards Bank Negara that no action was taken, no anger towards Maybank and other local banks? But the anger is towards Najib,” – Zaid Ibrahim, as quoted by Malaysiakini.

It should also be noted that Zaid will only be Najib’s lawyer for the SRC International case, for which the appeal was based on an alleged conflict of interest: the judge for this case – Nazlan Mohd Ghazali – allegedly had links to the case itself, and the MACC had looked into allegations of an unexplained sum of more than RM1 million in his account. Previously, Zaid had himself called for the Federal Court to seriously look into Najib’s application to nullify the SRC International conviction due to this.

“If there is even a shred of evidence, and the authorities should be able to verify this quite easily, that proves there was a conflict of interest on the part of the judge who convicted Najib, then the conviction must be nullified. Justice must not only be done but seen to be done,” – Zaid Ibrahim, as quoted by FMT.

So while we may be wrong about this, as we have no knowledge of what’s happening behind the scenes, Zaid Ibrahim becoming Najib’s lawyer for this particular case may not be a case of a katak jumping yet again, but rather a lawyer stepping up and upholding what he believes is right.