Tan Sri Vincent Lee denies involvement with The Coverage’s political attacks… again

Recently, a Malaysian news portal called The Coverage (thecoverage.my) riled up a lot of people. How exactly we dunno, but probably something to do with their neutral, non-biased reporting. Like here are some of things we saw on their front page:

Anyhow, politically-inclined people got pissed and started looking into who’s behind The Coverage. And perhaps unsurprisingly in this day and age…

Some people asked AI, and Claude said it’s MCA

We didn’t ask AI ar. We get the ick whenever someone contributes to comments with “I asked ChatGPT/Grok/Claude and it says…” like ew. Anyway, here’s one of the WhatsApp messages (it’s a long one):

Tl;dr, The Coverage is registered under Ace Event 168 Sdn. Bhd., under a guy called Shen Yee Aun who jumped from DAP to MCA, hence why the content sounds like political propaganda. However, IRR (or Idea River Run, parent company to several media outlets including Cilisos) also owns 40% of The Coverage, and IRR is 100% owned by businessman Tan Sri Vincent Lee Fook Long, also said to be associated with MCA since he donated millions to the party sometime in the past.

Even more tl;dr answer to who’s running The Coverage: MCA-associated Tan Sri Vincent Lee.

However…

Tan Sri Vincent Lee had denied any involvement (again)

Yes, again. In a Facebook post on his main account, he had denied any involvement in “any coordinated attacks against any political party, leader, organisation, or individual, and I reject any attempt to associate my Group of Companies with the content published by the platform.”

In the post, he mentioned that he had previously lodged police reports and reached out to the Suruhanjaya Syarikat Malaysia (SSM) against The Coverage.

According to the police report regarding the matter from back in 2018, it seems the issue was against Ace Event (owner of The Coverage) because IRR bought shares in the company but Ace have not been giving their audit reports for the past two years. This caused IRR to urge an investigation on Ace because they dunno what Ace is doing with the money. You can find a copy of the report here.

Anyways, while the report wasn’t specifically about The Coverage posting crap, it seems that IRR have no idea what’s going on in Ace or The Coverage, let alone have direction over their content. Despite that…

People have been associating IRR and Tan Sri Vincent with The Coverage since 2020

In 2020, someone wrote an investigative piece on Medium trying to find out who’s behind The Coverage, because back then they pissed people off by by recycling a piece of news from four years ago to mislead people into thinking that Lim Kit Siang wants to work with Najib to restore democracy.

However, they also included a clarification by Tan Sri Vincent Lee as well, where he admitted that he is indeed a shareholder, and that he did support and donated to MCA to help charities under the party, despite not being a member and not benefiting from business dealings from MCA.

However, he had not been associating with The Coverage for a long time.

Oof. Anyway, since the same thing is happening again half a decade later, Tan Sri Vincent Lee had stated that he will be making fresh police reports.

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