PUTRAJAYA - Toh Puan Naimah Khalid, the wife of Malaysia’s former finance minister Tun Daim Zainuddin, is expected to be charged on Jan 23 and has said she will fight the charge levelled against her.

“This is despite the fact that I assured them (the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission, MACC) that I would give a statement as soon as my husband’s medical procedure is over on Tuesday (Jan 23),” she said, adding that she had requested the court appearance to be postponed by 24 hours.

“I will be in court and I will fight this charge,” she said in a statement late on Jan 22.

It is learnt that she will be brought to the Kuala Lumpur Sessions Court at 9am to be charged under Section 36(2) of the MACC Act for failing to declare her assets.

In December 2023, the MACC seized the family-owned Menara Ilham, a 274m-tall tower, as part of its investigations.

The anti-graft agency previously said that the investigation carried out against Tun Daim is based on existing laws and information from the Pandora Papers – a massive leak of financial records in 2021 which revealed offshore assets held by politicians and public figures worldwide.

On Jan 10, the MACC officers summoned Toh Puan Naimah and the couple’s two sons to record their statement.

On the same day, Mr Daim and his family filed an application for leave to commence a judicial review against the MACC’s probe on them.

In the application, Mr Daim and Ms Naimah named the MACC and the public prosecutor as the first and second respondents respectively.

Ms Naimah had claimed that her husband had been persecuted for his success as a businessman and that there was a plot to make it seem that he was corrupt.

Following the seizure of Menara Ilham, Mr Daim hit out at the investigation on him and his family, claiming that it is nothing short of a political witch-hunt. THE STAR/ASIA NEWS NETWORK