Former attorney-general Tommy Thomas, who initiated the proceedings, comments on the court process and some ways to speed it up in this second part of an exclusive interview.

Malaysiakini: Looking back, do you think that the court bent backwards for Najib - considering the time it took for the case to complete and the kind of objections raised by the defence, there seems to be more leeway than given to an ordinary person?

Tommy Thomas: Well, I would answer it this way. I have considerable trial experience but always on the civil side, and when you do large trials, that means three or four weeks or more, we always say we want it to be completed in one go.

So, if it was a four-week trial, give us one month, Monday to Friday every week, the whole month, and civil judges tried to accommodate that.

I said to (trial judge) Justice (Mohd) Nazlan (Mohd Ghazali) [to do it in one go], and the reason is very simple - because it is much more efficient for lawyers on both sides and for the court to focus on one case for four weeks, five weeks, two months or three months: it is much more efficient.

Of course, (Najib’s lawyer Muhammad) Shafee (Abdullah) objected, saying it never happened like that in criminal courts. But justice Nazlan did not deal with my request. The effect was, as you know, the trial was done in phases.

So you get two weeks, then break, then three days, then break, and I think the trial lasted 50 or 60 days, spanning two years.

Elsewhere in the world, in the Roger Ng trial, which happened in the US, it was two weeks. Boris Becker’s trial in London was one week. They went to jail immediately.

Two months, I think, for Roger Ng.

The trial itself was about three weeks. They had a break.

So we have a structural problem in Malaysia and it is caused by Malaysian lawyers who don’t want trials to go from beginning to end. So let’s blame the lawyers first, and the courts are also reluctant.

If they had accepted my suggestion, we would have had three months of trial – and then there would have been a reserved judgment, and the judge could give the judgment.

That was what happened in the Court of Appeal and, to some extent, the Federal Court. The Federal Court gave 10 days, the Court of Appeal gave 15 days, so those two appellate courts were more amenable to what we had in mind.

On the point of a structural problem. I remember in your book, you also talked about how, in criminal cases, there is also a requirement in original documents for the maker to be called. And this lengthened the court process a lot. Could you talk about that and whether there are other structural issues in law that made the criminal trials go on for so long?

Some countries have moved forward with white-collar crimes. But Malaysia has not. So Malaysia still requires, in criminal cases, for the original documents to be tendered by the maker.