KUALA LUMPUR — People's Justice Party (PKR) deputy president Mohamed Azmin Ali’s lawyer said he and his client will not respond to “taunts” by Mr Haziq Abdullah Abdul Aziz with regards to any legal action that might or might not be taken against the 27-year-old.

“We do not act or respond according to such attention-seeking taunts,” lawyer N. Surendran said on Twitter on Sunday (June 23).

“All legal responses are done as we see fit, according to our timetable & not imposed by others.”

Mr Surendran was responding to a dare by Mr Haziq for Mr Azmin to take legal action against him if his claims that the two were sexually intimate were untrue.

The Santubong PKR Youth chief, who had confessed to being the man in a sex video with Mr Azmin, noted that the embattled PKR deputy president had never made a police report against him, even though his political secretary Muhammad Hilman Idham did.

“I am not a liar. I want the matter to be brought open in the court so that Malaysians can see for themselves the evidence. Malaysians would then be able to see who’s telling the truth,” Mr Haziq told The Star newspaper in his latest media interview on Sunday.

Mr Haziq, who was former senior private secretary to Deputy Primary Industries Minister Shamsul Iskandar Mohd Akin, told the daily that Mr Azmin had made wrongful accusations against him.

“In fact, I am a victim of the situation. If I am defaming him, he has all the right to sue me in a court of law,” he told The Star.

Mr Azmin has denied being the man in the video with Mr Haziq and claimed to be a victim of slander, saying that the video was the work of parties seeking to destroy his political career.

He also claimed to have only had minimal contact with Mr Haziq and denied reports that the two were close.

However, Mr Haziq told The Malaysian Insight in an interview last week that he had known Mr Azmin from his days as an undergraduate in Universiti Malaya and had grown close to the veteran politician from 2014.

“I first got to know Azmin from when I was studying at Universiti Malaya. I assisted in Azmin’s election campaign when he was challenged by Khalid Ibrahim,” he said, referring to the former Selangor menteri besar.

Mr Haziq also denied that he was paid to make accusations against Mr Azmin or that he tried to escape when he was detained by police at the Kuala Lumpur International Airport last week.