Putrajaya has withdrawn its plan to hike the salaries of MPs following objections raised by several opposition lawmakers.

Datuk Seri Mohamed Nazri Aziz announced today that he had decided to withdraw the RM30 million allocated in Budget 2012 after reading numerous news reports that the lawmakers were against the proposal.

But the minister in the Prime Minister’s Department in charge of parliamentary affairs expressed disappointment at the apparent disunity among MPs over the proposal, which was presented to him last Wednesday by a bipartisan “parliamentary review committee”.

Nazri (picture)explained that he had pleaded for the inclusion of the committee’s proposal to Datuk Seri Najib Razak last Friday morning, barely hours before the prime minister was due to table Budget 2012 in Parliament.

He said that at the time he was under the impression that all MPs, including those from Barisan Nasional (BN), Pakatan Rakyat (PR) and independent representatives, were in support of the plan, due to the bipartisan composition of the committee.

Following his persuasion, Nazri said Najib had agreed to the proposal on condition that all MPs backed the move.

“I apologise to the prime minister for my failure to live up to the expectation. I failed to obtain the support of all MPs,” Nazri told a press conference here.