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Thursday, April 22, 2010

Fake degree? RPK zeroes in on Kamalanathan


By FMT staff

Popular blogger Raja Petra Kamaruddin remains unconvinced about Barisan Nasional candidate P Kamalathan's educational qualification.

His doubts continue to linger despite Kamalanathan posting his degree, obtained from the Edith Cowan University (ECU) in Australia, on his blog today.

In an immediate response, Raja Petra penned an article with the title “It just does not add up”, and posed the question if the certificate was forged.

This is a serious allegation and candidates who state fraudulent information in their nomination papers would be disqualified.

“We tried verifying his certificate but it appears like what he uploaded on his blog may be a fake certificate after all.

“The certificate in fact raises more questions than it provided answers. Is this certificate a forgery?” asked the blogger, who is known for his controversial disclosures.

Raja Petra said the BN candidate's certificate carries the name 'P Kamalanathanlp. Panchanathan' with the parchment number 2004100372, and the date stated as Jan 23, 2004.

“However, a search that we did still does not produce any results whereas we did two other searches on other people (also Olympia College twinning students) and they came back positive.

“We also tried using six different name variations but they all came back blank.

“Note that the name we used in the search on 'Claire' was not complete yet it came back positive. It could still trace the details even with the incomplete name,” he said, providing screenshots of the searches done and a link to the search engine.

Confirmation from Olympia College

Meanwhile, news portal Malaysian Insider published an article today where Olympia College confirmed that Kamalanathan was a registered student at the college and completed his course.

Olympia's academic director Tan Chee Seng said Kamalanathan's actual student record was no longer available.

However, he added that he remembers Kamalanathan and confirmed that he did an external course in communications, majoring in public relations with the abovementioned Australian varsity.

Tan also explained that universities sometimes kept separate registers for off-campus students and that might explain why a search of the ECU alumni roll turned up nothing, as claimed by Raja Petra.

Apart from this, Tan also revealed that Olympia College only processed one batch of students with ECU before both sides terminated the programme in 2004.

In a previous posting, Raja Petra had claimed that Olympia College did not offer a Bachelors in Communications and that ECU did not offer off-campus courses in the subject.

Previously, Kamalanathan said that he completed the course entirely off-campus.

The 44-year-old BN candidate, who is now actively campaigning for the Hulu Selangor parliamentary seat, could not be reached for comment today.

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