KUALA LUMPUR:Popular blogger Raja Petra Kamaruddin remains unconvinced about Barisan Nasional candidate P Kamalanathan's educational qualification.
His doubts continue to linger despite Kamalanathan posting on his blog today a scanned image of what he said was his degree certificate.
The parchment, from Edith Cowan University in Western Australia, is for the degree of Bachelor of Communication, in the name of "P Kamalanathanlp. Panchanathan".
In response, Raja Petra questioned if the certificate was forged, in an article entitled “It just does not add up”.
A forged certificate would be an election offence; candidates who state fraudulent information in their nomination papers would be disqualified.
Raja Petra, who is known for making controversial disclosures, wrote: “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?”
Raja Petra said the posted certificate carries the name 'P Kamalanathanlp. Panchanathan' with the parchment number 2004100372, and the date 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.
Verbal confirmation from Olympia College
News portal Malaysian Insider also reported article today that Olympia College had verbally 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 remembered Kamalanathan, and he confirmed that Kamalanathan did an external course in communications, majoring in public relations with the 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.
Tan also revealed that Olympia College processed only one batch of students with ECU before both sides terminated the programme in 2004.
In a previous posting, Raja Petra had said that Olympia College did not offer a Bachelor in Communications and that ECU did not offer off-campus courses in the subject.
Kamalanathan had previously said that he completed the course entirely off-campus.
The 44-year-old BN candidate, who is actively campaigning for the Hulu Selangor parliamentary seat, could not be reached for comment today.
FMT
23/04/10
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