1MDB: Jail terms sought for accused in US$1.8 bln fund fraud

Lawyers for two men accused of embezzling US$1.8 billion from the Malaysian sovereign wealth fund 1MDB began laying out their case Thursday after Swiss state prosecutors sought hefty jail terms.

PetroSaudi chief executive Tarek Obaid and Patrick Mahony, a director at the Saudi oil exploration and production company, are on trial at Switzerland’s Federal Criminal Court in the southern city of Bellinzona.

They are accused of involvement in a vast embezzlement orchestrated by Jho Low, an advisor to former Malaysian prime minister Najib Razak.

Noting the sums involved compared to Malaysia’s GDP, prosecutor Alice de Chambrier on Wednesday called it the “scam of the century” and branded the defendants as “calculative, manipulative and obscenely greedy”, the Keystone-ATS news agency reported.

She sought a 10-year sentence for Obaid and a nine-year term for his right-hand man.

Prosecutors also requested the detention of the two due to the perceived risk of flight in the gap between the trial and the verdict. Obaid is a Swiss-Saudi dual national, while Mahony is Swiss-British.

Obaid’s lawyer Daniel Zappelli highlighted the absence of Najib and Low, and said there were variations in the amounts that the defendants allegedly laundered, Keystone-ATS reported.