Dewan Rakyat Speaker Pandikar Amin Mulia has congratulated a DAP lawmaker for scouring the Internet to dispute his remark on the walkout staged by Pakatan Harapan MPs when Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak tabled Budget 2017 in Parliament on Oct 21.

He also admitted to not being as well-versed, or careless, in "Googling".

Pandikar was responding to Segambut MP Lim Lip Eng, who discovered a statement on the Internet which revealed that in 1981, several parliamentarians had left the House of Commons when the finance minister tabled the budget.

The DAP lawmaker raised this issue with regard to Pandikar's statement that no MP had ever walked out of the House of Commons when the budget was tabled.

In his media statement today, the speaker said there was a fundamental difference between what transpired in the Dewan Rakyat and the House of Commons.

"My carelessness or mistake is used by YB Segambut (Lim) to justify the action of the opposition MPs in walking out.

"But there is a fundamental thing which was not mentioned by YB Segambut, which is that the move to stage a walkout was planned earlier to embarrass the finance minister (Najib).

"This means the catalyst was not because of disagreement with the budget but to shame the finance minister on a personal level," Pandikar added.

This, he said, was proven when the MPs carried placards with the words, "Siapa MO1? (Who is MO1?)"

As for the incident in the House of Commons, Pandikar said, the parliamentarians did not intend to embarrass the finance minister, and there was no prior planning of walking out.

The speaker said there was no reason for him to apologise to the opposition MPs on the grounds that he had evicted them from the House because they had planned to do so on their own accord, and that they also breached Standing Order 41 (1) (e).