Makna Not Affected By Elie's Case, Says Farid

KUALA LUMPUR, Jan 18 (Bernama) -- The National Cancer Council (Makna)'s activities will not be affected even if it does not receive the RM1.1 billion donation pledged by Lebanese businessman Elie Yousef Najem to the body.
Its President Datuk Mohamad Farid Ariffin said the management and activities of the charitable organisation to help low income cancer patients, went on as normal without the donation from Elie.
"This is not affecting us, we have raised RM19 million without Dr Elie's help and that's a lot of money. More than 70 per cent of it must be spent for the poor.
"Whatever happens, we continue to do our work because our motive, our target, our agenda and our purpose of existing is for cancer patients who are poor. Whatever happens, the poor must get the necessary help," he said after opening the Makna-Universiti Putra Malaysia (UPM) cancer research laboratory, here Wednesday.
On Jan 7, Elie, a self-proclaimed billionaire who claims a net worth of US$46 billion (RM175 billion), created a controversy when he announced a pledge of US$275 million (RM1.1 billion) to Makna, to set up a hospital cum centre for cancer treatment and research for children in this country.
After the announcement to the media, Elie was faced with allegations of cheating involving thousands of ringgit in this country. He is now being remanded by the police for further investigation.
Mohamad Farid said Makna was used to pledges, which were not fulfilled, but Elie's pledge involving a huge sum of money "comes in our path once in 10 years."
" But more importantly we talk about long term sustainable income, we don't talk about donation. We talk about sustainable fund development," he said.
Mohamad Farid said Makna had never questioned its donors so long as it complied with regulations stipulated by Bank Negara, and this included not accepting money from sources (haram) which are against the Islamic law such as gambling, liquor, tobacco and money laundering.
At present, the body was making efforts to collect donation totalling RM150 million over five years to help finance the treatment of cancer for the less fortunate patients, he said.
Earlier, UPM Vice Chancellor Prof Dr Nik Mustapha Raja Abdullah said the Makna-UPM research laboratory, incepted in January last year, in principle conducted research activities to upgrade the treatment and management of cancer patients.
For a start, the laboratory conducted several research programmes on the use of natural resources from herbs for cancer treatment.
Research activities in the laboratory are divided into five groups, that is therapeutic herbal medicine, clinical research, diagnostic, statistic and epidimology and clinical service.
Based on statistics, the number of people with cancer in the country was around 150 cases to every 100,000 people each year and this meant there were about 33,000 new cancer cases each year or 90 new cases each day, he said.
"In general, cancer patients in the country are 10 years younger than those in developed countries," he said.