A senior government investigator involved in the ongoing 1MDB matters said that apart from communication devices, Ng has claimed that other material suppressed included correspondence between the Goldman Sachs bankers and board members of the global investment bank, and details of the Malaysian government officials who were bribed to facilitate the illegal dealings at 1MDB.
“Our lawyers in the US are already preparing the legal strategy on how to move forward on this front,” the government official said.
These latest developments show how the DOJ investigation into the 1MDB affair that began in 2015 continues to percolate in Malaysia and elsewhere in the world.
A state-controlled entity set up by now jailed premier Najib Razak in 2009, 1MDB has become the shorthand for one of the world’s largest cases of kleptocracy.
More than US$4.5 billion was found to have been misappropriated from the fund, according to the DOJ.
The scandal toppled the Najib administration in a national election in 2018, sent the former premier to jail in August 2022, and triggered a global manhunt for rogue financier Low.
Last Thursday, a Luxembourg court fined Edmond de Rothschild Bank roughly US$28 million for its role in money laundering funds tied to 1MDB.
LESS-THAN-CORDIAL RELATIONS
Malaysia’s latest wrangle with the DOJ over Leissner, who has been slapped with a lifetime ban by the Monetary Authority of Singapore to operate in the island state’s financial sector, joins a pattern of less-than-cordial relations between the two parties.
US-based lawyers involved in the ongoing recovery of assets and funds tied to 1MDB noted that ties between Malaysia and the DOJ have long been testy, particularly over the Malaysian government’s often unilateral actions in seizing assets tied to 1MDB.
One case was Malaysia’s seizure of luxury yacht Equanimity in August 2018, when the vessel was docked in the holiday resort of Bali in Indonesia.
Lawyers and investigators familiar with the situation at the time noted that the Indonesian authorities were to hand over the Cayman-registered 92m yacht to the DOJ.
But Malaysia used its close ties to the Indonesian police to get the yacht to make its way to Port Klang, before taking possession of the ship.
Malaysian government officials have grudgingly acknowledged that relations with the DOJ were ruffled because of the Equanimity affair, but they said that the DOJ has also been sometimes less-than-cooperative in other 1MDB-related matters.
Getting the DOJ to return Ng to Malaysia was one of those testy affairs.
