PUTRAJAYA — FashionValet Sdn Bhd (FashionValet) founders Datin Vivy Yusof and her husband, Datuk Fadzaruddin Shah Anuar were questioned for a fourth straight day by the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission (MACC) today.
They arrived in a dark coloured vehicle at the MACC headquarters here 9.14 am, according to Bernama, to answer more questions related to Khazanah Nasional Bhd’s (Khazanah) and Permodalan Nasional Bhd’s (PNB) RM43.9 million losses after investing in their company in 2018.
They were seen leaving MACC at 1.58pm, having spent nearly five hours at the anti-graft agency.
MACC chief commissioner Tan Sri Azam Baki said earlier that the agency had detected suspicious financial transactions by FashionValet between 2018 and last year.
Besides the duo, MACC is also investigating several other parties, Azam added.
Vivy and Fdzaruddin are not being detained, he added, as they are fully cooperating with the investigation.
Under the probe dubbed Ops Favish, MACC has, to date, frozen several private and company bank accounts belonging to the couple’s FashionValet e-commerce platform, worth approximately RM1.1 million.
The agency has also seized documents from four offices – FashionValet’s headquarters in Bangsar, Khazanah, PNB and the Finance Ministry – for further inspection.
Khazanah and PNB’s losses were stated in a parliamentary written reply dated October 29 by the Finance Ministry.
In 2018, the two government-linked investment companies had injected RM47 million into FashionValet, then a loss-making company, and sold their stakes for RM3.1 million at the end of last year.
Although the ministry has said the losses are minimal compared to the GLICs’ overall earnings for the year, the matter is still raising public ire over the involvement of public funds.
MACC’s Azam said previously that the probe into FashionValet was of public interest as it involved public monies.
The investigation is under Section 18 of the MACC Act 2009 which pertains to the offence of providing false documents such as receipts and invoices for the purpose of deception. The penalty is maximum imprisonment of 20 years, and a fine or RM10,000 or five times the value of the false claims, whichever is higher. – November 8, 2024
