Ong to Gerakan: Get your facts and figures straight

KUALA LUMPUR: Gerakan should have used updated information before saying Penang has the slowest growth in GDP per capita in Malaysia since 2007.
Serdang MP Ong Kian Ming said the data used was from 2011 which does not reflect actual economic growth in Penang.
"He used outdated Department of Statistics figures, if you used updated figures and I recalculated with it, Terengganu is the lowest," Ong told a press conference today.
He said Penang's GDP growth from 2007 to 2015 is at 43% when updated statistics are used while Terengganu stands at 36.2%.
Ong then said Gerakan failed to acknowledge that Penang was the hardest hit state in Malaysia during the 2008 financial crisis due to its dependency on global trade.
Even though the Malaysian economy was only reduced by 1.5%, he said, Penang's economy contracted by a staggering 10.5%.
Ong said this cause slower economic growth in Penang but the state government worked hard to recover from the crisis.
"From 2010 to 2015, Penang's GDP growth rate was higher than the Malaysian growth rate in all years except for 2012," he said.
Gerakan secretary general Liang Teck Meng recently said Penang has the slowest growth rate of GDP per capita in the country.
Liang then called on the state government to consult with Minister in Prime Minister's Department in charge of the Economic Planning Unit (EPU) Datuk Abdul Rahman Dahlan.
However, Ong rubbished the suggestion as Abdul Rahman's home state of Sabah is among the slowest growing state according to his calculations, just behind Terengganu.