KUALA LUMPUR, April 27 – Khairy Jamaluddin today rejected the Public Accounts Committee’s (PAC) request for the government to postpone formalising any financial contract with private companies over MySejahtera until July.
The powerful bipartisan Dewan Rakyat committee, which is empowered to examine government procurement and expenditure, told the government last Saturday not to make any decision involving financial implications on the Covid-19 app, until the PAC tables the findings from its MySejahtera investigation in the next Parliament meeting in July, and its report is debated by MPs.
“The Ministry of Health’s (MOH) decision to sign this contract is not subject to the PAC’s report, or more accurately, we are finalising the contract to get certainty, which is better for all parties,” Khairy told a press conference today.
He said last April 14 that MOH was at the final stages of negotiations with MySJ Sdn Bhd for the direct award of the MySejahtera contract.
Court documents show that MySejahtera app developer Entomo Malaysia Sdn Bhd (formerly KPISoft Malaysia Sdn Bhd) sold MySejahtera’s intellectual property and a software licence to use its proprietary KPISoft software to develop the app to MySJ for RM338.6 million in an agreement until end 2025.
The procurement and development of MySejahtera is under investigation by the PAC – amid uncertainties about the ownership of the app and its huge database containing the personal data of more than 38 million registered users – after the committee found that the government had never signed a contract with KPISoft Malaysia over the national security mobile application.
PAC chairman Wong Kah Woh also confirmed — after his committee heard testimonies from Khairy, Finance Minister Tengku Zafrul Aziz, and top officials from the Malaysian Administrative Modernisation and Management Planning Unit (MAMPU), the National Security Council (MKN), and the National Cyber Security Agency (NACSA) — that the government did not even issue a letter of appointment for KPISoft, save a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) on MySejahtera data.
He further said that the government was “confused” about who had appointed KPISoft to develop MySejahtera.
KPISoft received the MySejahtera project – without going through an open tender process – after offering to develop the app for the government for free through an initial one-year corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiative that ended March 31, 2021.
Earlier today, Khairy announced that MySejahtera check-ins to public premises would no longer be mandatory from May 1, but he urged Malaysians to continue using the app to report their Covid-19 test results and to get home surveillance orders if they test positive.
