In a sting video conducted by Britain's Channel 4, Cambridge Analytica Managing Director Mark Turnbull is heard boasting of the company's work in Malaysia's 2013 election.

But it really wasn't much a revelation. Navigate on Cambridge Analytica's webpage, click on case studies, select Malaysia, and a page appears with a prominent photo of the country's Prime Minister Najib Razak and his inner circle.

The page says that the controversial company carried out a targeted campaign on behalf of Najib's Barisan Nasional alliance, highlighting the work the government had done to improve education in the battleground state of Kedah.

The BN party had lost Kedah to the opposition in 2003 and was desperate to regain it. Leading BN's charge in the state was Mukhriz Mahathir, son of the former prime minister of 22 years, Mahathir Mohamad. BN regained the state and Mukhriz became Kedah's chief minister.

That was before he and his father Mahathir abandoned the ruling coalition and became leading lights in the opposition Pakatan Harapan alliance, ostensibly over the multi-billion dollar financial scandal involving state investment firm 1MDB, which they blame on Najib.

"The revelations that came out about Cambridge Analytica made them completely toxic," says Sholto Byrnes of Malaysia's Institute for Strategic and International Studies. "Nobody wanted to be associated with them so it wasn't surprising that somebody raised this prospect in Malaysia and my own view on it is that the opposition raised it and it backfired on them."

Najib denied that Cambridge Analytica had ever worked directly for BN. Instead, he said they were hired by Mukhriz Mahathir in his personal capacity. Mukhriz in turn refuted that. But Cambridge Analytica's country representative seemed to back the prime minister's story, saying he had indeed worked for Mukhriz.

Aside from the scandal surrounding the firm's data mining, there's another reason everyone was so keen to dissociate themselves from it: Malaysia is headed into a heated election campaign.

"Nationalism always comes up in election times here so the use of foreign consultants and the use of foreign anything is controversial in an election cycle. So that's something that you want to tack onto your opponents," says Keith Leong, a political analyst at KRA Group.

The government of Najib Razak, in fact, has used controversial foreign consultants. In his first term as prime minister, Najib employed a firm called APCO to burnish Malaysia's media image abroad. It proved deeply embarrassing, when it emerged that APCO had previously advised the government of Israel and had former members of Mossad, Israel's secret service, on its board. Malaysia is a staunch supporter of the Palestinian cause and has no diplomatic relations with Israel.

But amid the "he said, he said" trading of allegations over Cambridge Analytica, Professor Terence Gomez of University of Malaya says it really makes no difference who precisely was responsible.

"The fact of the matter is that Barisan Nasional was complicit, it was clear they used Cambridge Analytica in that election and they need to account for it," the political economist says.

"The key issue here is access to data. Where did this data come from? Who gave Cambridge Analytica the data? This can also speak to the issue of abuse of power in channeling to a private source confidential data of citizens of Malaysia." But as analyst Keith Leong points out, the Cambridge Analytica story centers on the rights and wrongs of political consulting and use of big data…not everyday topics of conversation here in Malaysia.

And despite the two sides' efforts to make the mud of this messy controversy stick to their adversaries, it will have nowhere near the resonance with voters as bread and butter issues, like the rising cost of living.