Smoking RM500m for Cambridge?

Readers of the blog will remember that I posted on "RM500m for Cambridge?" more than a month back. It was posted following a post on Anwar Ibrahim's blog which alleged such an expenditure by Malaysia.

Well, it appears now that there appears to be some smoke, albeit the presence of fire is yet to be confirmed.

Sdr Lim Kit Siang had asked the Higher Education Minister, Datuk Mustapha Mohamed in Parliament whether it is true that the government had agreed to give a RM500 million donation to Cambridge University and that Petronas and Khazanah Nasional had each forked out RM190 million.

This is a budget which is exceeded only by the allocation to Universiti Teknologi Mara (UiTM) as no other local university would be allocated with a bigger sum for 2007.

The Minister of Higher Education denied in a roundabout way that there had been a RM500 million donation to Cambridge University, without completely dismissing the subject, using terms like “premature” and “final decision has yet to be made”.

When [Sdr Lim] pointed out that using terms of like “premature” and “final decision has yet to be made” presupposes that the subject was a very active issue and asked why, as well as the reason for the government giving consideration to such an extraordinary endowment to Cambridge University, Mustapha said that this was part of the Ministry’s “smart partnership” with foreign universities to achieve excellence in tertiary education.

Woh... now, that's definitely a case for "no smoke without fire".