Senior lawyer VK Lingam could not remember the numbers of his mobile phones, according to Anti-Corruption Agency (ACA) officer Chuah Lay Choo today.

She told the royal commission on the Lingam tape that this was the reason why she was unable to obtain his mobile phone numbers when she interviewed him recently.

“Lingam told me he couldn’t remember (the numbers) as most of his phones have prepaid lines,” said Chua when grilled on this by Bar Council lawyer Ranjit Singh.

She added that there were also no records since he was using prepaid lines. Prior to 2006, prepaid mobile phone users were not required to register or provide their details.

However, Chuah revealed that former chief justice Ahmad Fairuz Sheikh Abdul Halim had been using the same mobile phone number all these years.

“Yes, we did investigate Ahmad Fairuz. We found that he used O13 (Celcom) since 2000 and we have asked for full details (of his telephone records), but we do not have VK Lingam’s numbers to make a comparison,” she said in response to another question from Ranjit.

Telephone records

Chua said she was still waiting for the full telephone records of Ahmad Fairuz from Celcom and added that it was only yesterday that she discovered the actual date of the conversation.

Businessman Loh Mui Fah had told the commission yesterday that the alleged conversation between Lingam and Ahmad Fairuz on the appointment of ‘friendly’ judges took place on Dec 20, 2001 when he was at the lawyer’s house for dinner.

Meanwhile, Chuah also testified that she had requested Ahmad Fairuz’s home phone records from year 2000, but not that of his office.

She also told the commission that she had requested phone records from telecommunications provider Digi, Maxis and Celcom in late 2007 but is yet to receive the required details.

Following this, commissioner Mahadev Shankar directed Chuah to inform the telecommunications companies that the royal commission requires the details for investigations.

“If (the companies) are not cooperative, (the commission) will “help” them to cooperate,” he said, drawing laughter from the room.

Quizzed on discrepancies

Chuah also addressed the discrepancies in her transcript raised by the Bar Council yesterday.

She accepted seven of the 11 “material discrepancies” highlighted, some of which were supplementary to the dialogues she could not ascertain.

However, she maintained that she still heard the name James Kumar and not James Foong, as suggested by the Bar Council.

According to the transcript provided by opposition party PKR, the judge referred to in the conversation was named 'James Kumar'.

'Lingam: Eusoff Chin and I are extremely close. Because you know…Yeah. Eusoff Chin in power, I can straight and get in Pom! Pom! Pom! Pom! But now (Mohd) Dzaiddin (Abdullah) is there. So Dzaiddin is attacking our cases. That means what? James Kumar is aligned to Dzaiddin. But Dzaiddin is retiring in 15th of September. He is finished.'

Possibility of a rift

However, Ranjit insisted on clearing the disagreement. “James Foong is a judge ... (while) Kumar is not anybody we know,” he said.

The lawyer said this suggested a rift between former chief justices Eusoff and Dzaiddin, with Foong allegedly aligned with the latter.

Yesterday, the inquiry heard that Foong, who is currently a Court of Appeal judge, had presided over Loh’s case in 2001.

The commission, however, proceeded with the inquiry after promising to take note of that point in the course of their inquiry.

Three other new witnesses who testified today were former chief secretary to the government Samsudin Osman, Federal Court’s former deputy director of personnel department Pushpa Al Bakri Devadason, 37, and ACA officer Moses Lawrence, 33.

The inquiry heard that Lawrence had gone to Lingam’s house on Jan 7 this year to digitally-record voice samples of the lawyer reading the phone conversation transcript aloud.