Fugitive financier faces U.S. charges
WASHINGTON The U.S. Justice Department on Thursday charged a fugitive Malaysian financier in a money laundering and bribery scheme that pilfered billions of dollars from a Malaysian investment fund created to promote economic development projects in that country.
The three-count indictment charges Low Taek Jho, also known as Jho Low, with misappropriating money from the state-owned fund and using it for bribes and kickbacks to foreign officials, to pay for luxury real estate, art and jewelry in the United States and to fund Hollywood movies, including The Wolf of Wall Street.
Also charged was a former Goldman Sachs banker, Tim Leissner, who pleaded guilty to money laundering conspiracy and to conspiring to violate foreign bribery laws.
Another former bank official, Ng Chong Hwa, 51, also known as Roger Ng, was arrested earlier Thursday in Malaysia and accused of circumventing internal accounting controls, prosecutors said.
Lawyers for Low and Leissner did not immediately return messages seeking comment. Goldman Sachs, which the indictment says raised about US$6.5 billion through bond offerings for the fund, also did not immediately comment.
Police in Malaysia said in July that Low had fled Macau to an unknown destination. He remains at large.
Leissner acknowledged paying millions of dollars in bribes and kickbacks to government officials in Malaysia and Abu Dhabi, according to court records. He was ordered to forfeit US$43.7 million as part of his guilty plea.
The charges are the first arising from the epic corruption scandal at the state investment fund known as 1MDB.
The Justice Department in 2016 moved to recover more than US$1 billion that it said had been stolen, filing a civil complaint that sought the forfeiture of property including a Manhattan penthouse, a Beverly Hills mansion, a luxury jet and paintings by Vincent Van Gogh and Claude Monet.
In a speech last year in Washington, U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions denounced the scandal as “kleptocracy at its worst.”
The pilfered funds were used on a “lavish spending spree,” the attorney general said, including a Us$265-million yacht and a Us$100-million investment in the music label EMI.
“In total, 1MDB officials allegedly laundered more than $4.5 billion in funds through a complex web of opaque transactions and fraudulent shell companies with bank accounts in countries ranging from Switzerland and Singapore to Luxembourg and the United States,” Sessions said.
The fund, 1Malaysia Development Berhad, was set up in 2009 by then-prime minister Najib Razak to promote economic development. It relied primarily on debt to fund investment and economic development projects and was overseen by senior Malaysian government officials, according to court records.
The scandal has had political ramifications in Malaysia, where Najib in 2015 sacked his attorney general and a deputy PM for demanding answers about 1MDB.