Petaling Jaya MP Lee resigns from PKR leadership council over MyKhas access removal

On May 29, Petaling Jaya MP Lee Chean Chung lost access to MyKhas, the portal that manages parliamentary allocations. Two weeks later, on Friday, June 12, he announced his resignation from PKR's central leadership council.

Lee's departure from the party's inner circle marks a rare public break between a sitting MP and his party leadership. In a Facebook statement, he explained that the removal of his MyKhas access had effectively blocked his office from distributing constituency allocations and running community programmes—a consequence he characterized as punishment inflicted on the voters who elected him. The portal, which manages funds available to parliamentarians, had been his tool for serving Petaling Jaya. Without it, his ability to function as a constituency representative was severely curtailed.

What made the move particularly stinging, Lee suggested, was the absence of a direct explanation. He said he had sought clarification from PKR leadership but received only a statement from a deputy secretary-general attributing the action to "political choices." The party itself, he noted, had never formally explained the decision to him or to his constituents. For a politician who had spent 18 years inside PKR—eight of them on its central leadership council—the silence felt like a deliberate slight.

Lee's political arc had been bound to the party since its early days. He began as a research officer in Anwar Ibrahim's office when PKR was still in opposition, from 2008 to 2011. He had watched the party grow from a scrappy challenger into a governing force, and he had risen with it. In his resignation statement, he reflected on how PKR leaders in those early years had operated without the resources and privileges now available to some politicians. The contrast seemed to weigh on him—a party that had once been lean and principled now wielding power in ways that felt opaque to one of its own.

Yet Lee's resignation was carefully calibrated. He made clear he was stepping down only from his leadership council seat, not from the party itself. He would remain a PKR member and continue serving as an MP in the Dewan Rakyat for as long as Parliament remained in session. His quarrel was not with membership but with the leadership's handling of him. He was, in effect, staying in the party while publicly objecting to how it had treated him.

The timing and nature of the move suggested deeper fractures within PKR over how resources are allocated and how party discipline is enforced. The removal of MyKhas access appeared to be a tool of internal control, a way to pressure or punish members deemed disloyal. Lee's public complaint about the lack of explanation—his insistence that he and his constituents deserved to know why—highlighted a gap between how the party wielded power and how it communicated about that power. For a party that had built its identity on opposing authoritarian governance, the parallel was uncomfortable.

Lee's statement left the broader question unresolved: what political choice had prompted the removal of his access in the first place? The party had not said, and Lee was not saying either. What was clear was that a senior MP with nearly two decades of party loyalty had decided that his position on the leadership council was no longer tenable under these circumstances. Whether others in PKR would follow, or whether this marked an isolated protest, remained to be seen.