We have absolutely no intention to ‘take over’ Sabah.  We never have done.  The original Sultan who owned the land signed a lease in 1878 and he and his heirs were happy that this lease be transferred from the businessmen that signed it to their Company, then on to the British Government and finally to Malaysia.  That land was not – unlike the Sultanate of Sulu – part of the Philippines, a point that has been made clear at regular intervals.

All these counterparties honored the lease.  As a historical footnote, after the lease was established, the Sultan did intervene in the 1890s when his tenant, then the British North Borneo Company, asked him to help protect their operations from Mat Salleh.  Because it was his territory.

However, years later the Malaysian Government seems to have unthinkingly reacted to the Lahad Datu event of 2013 by breaking the 1878 Agreement that was the bedrock of Sabah’s legal integrity.  In doing so, like any tenant that stops paying rent, they invalidated their own rights, and forced a situation in which Sabah technically reverts to the ownership of Sulu.  Having deliberately taken action that hands Sabah back to us, they now claim that it is our lawsuit that threatens their sovereignty!  You cannot convincingly spend 135 years paying a lease and then, probably in error, pretend that there is no lease, and never was.

The only threat to sovereignty was self-inflicted by Malaysia in 2013, and subsequently repeatedly reinforced in government rhetoric by many Ministers.    We would not choose to create some artificial state in the South China Sea.  We just want Malaysia to honor its debts.