If govt fulfils election promises Malaysia will go bankrupt, says Guan Eng

Lim said if the government went ahead to fulfil all the election promises Malaysia could go bankrupt

(FMT) Finance Minister Lim Guan Eng says the Pakatan Harapan government has proven critics who said the country would go bankrupt without the goods and services tax (GST) wrong.

“During campaining, our opponents said the country will go bankrupt without the GST. We’ve proven them wrong, on June 1 we freed ourselves from GST, we didn’t go bankrupt,” he said, during a live interview with RTM tonight.

“It shows our calculations were correct that we can do without the GST. But because our financial situation was worse than expected, some promises in our manifesto may be delayed, but we will deliver on them.” 

Lim said if the government went ahead to fulfil all the promises, given the country’s finances, Malaysia could go bankrupt and the government couldn’t allow that to happen.

He also defended the Tabung Harapan Rakyat initiative and gave his guarantee that every sen donated to the fund would go towards reducing the country’s debts.

On claims that the fund will give an impression of desperation, Lim said that the government was aware that the crowdfunding initiative would not resolve the country’s debts but it was set up to meet the requests of the people who felt that they needed to do something to help.

“The fund cannot settle our RM1 trillion debts. Even if we pay RM1 million a day to resolve our debts, it will require 2,740 years to settle.”

Earlier today, it was reported that RM30 million had been collected since the fund was set up five days ago.