What a contrast - in New York a Goldman Sachs banker is standing corruption trial but in Malaysia the key personality in the 1MDB scandal is seeking to return as the 10th or 11th Prime Minister of Malaysia
What a contrast - in New York a Goldman Sachs banker is standing corruption trial but in Malaysia the key personality in the 1MDB scandal is seeking to return as the 10th or 11th Prime Minister of Malaysia.
Roger Ng, Goldman's former head of investment banking in Malaysia, has pleaded not guilty to helping to launder hundreds of millions of dollars looted from Malaysia's 1MDB sovereign wealth fund and bribing officials to win business.
He is charged with three counts of conspiracy to launder money and to violate an anti-bribery law.
Jury selection began yesterday in the U.S. corruption trial.
Goldman helped sell US$6.5 billion of bonds for 1MDB, a fund former Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak launched to spur economic development.
Authorities said fund officials and accomplices looted some of the money to spend on luxuries, while Goldman bankers paid more than US$1.6 billion in bribes to officials in Malaysia and Abu Dhabi for 1MDB business.
Goldman agreed in 2020 to pay US$2.9 billion in penalties and have a Malaysian unit admit criminal wrongdoing to settle probes by the U.S. Department of Justice and other authorities into its role in 1MDB.
But in Malaysia, the person most responsible for the 1MDB scandal, described by the then US Attorney-General Jeff Sessions at an international conference in December 2017 as “kleptocracy at its worst”, is campaigning to return as the 10th or 11 Prime Minister of the country.
The 1MDB scandal is the biggest failure of the country’s anti-corruption agency in the nation’s history but before the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission (MACC) can live down this infamy, the MACC Chief Commissioner Azam Baki is embroiled in the greatest confidence crisis when he lost all confidence and support of Malaysians to head the MACC when he failed to be an example of integrity, probity and accountability and was unable to explain conflict-of-interest allegations which had been made against him for over three months.
Is Prime Minister Ismail Sabri so impotent that he is unable to ask Azam Baki to go on leave until Azam had cleared himself of the serious allegations?
I recently came across the comments of the former British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, in the book “The Wolf Catcher”, where he compared two “notorious cases of wrongdoing at the highest level” – Malaysia’s 1MDB and Brazil’s Pertrobas.
Gordon Brown said: “But the 1MDB theft – with its global scope and scale, and its geo-political fallout – has reached even deeper than the oil company scandal that has engulfed Brazil.”
Malaysia will suffer a double infamy if the major protagonist in the 1MDB scandal can return as the 10th or 11th Prime Minister of Malaysia.