U.S. Targets $1 Billion in Assets in Malaysian Embezzlement Case

By LOUISE STORY

New York Times

JULY 20, 2016

The United States government moved Wednesday to seize more than $1 billion in assets purchased with money that it believes was stolen from a Malaysian sovereign wealth fund by people close to the country’s embattled prime minister.

Hidden in the United States in real estate, art and other luxury goods, the money was embezzled from the fund and moved around the world using secretive shell companies that masked its trail, the Justice Department said.

The $1 billion that prosecutors say was laundered in the United States is but a portion of the billions that international investigators suspect was siphoned off by high-level officials at the fund and their associates. The fund — called 1Malaysia Development Berhad, or 1MDB — is overseen by the prime minister, Najib Razak, and has become a focus of rising popular discontent with Mr. Najib’s government amid several investigations at home and abroad.

The forfeiture complaints, issued by a unit known as the Kleptocracy Asset Recovery Initiative, represent the largest such case brought by the Justice Department. The United States is among several governments, including Malaysia, Singapore and Switzerland, that have investigated the fund.

“1MDB was ostensibly created to pursue investment and development projects for the economic benefit of Malaysia and its people, primarily relying on the issuance of various debt securities to fund these projects,” the department said in one of its court filings. “However, over the course of an approximately four-year period, between approximately 2009 and at least 2013, multiple individuals, including public officials and their associates, conspired to fraudulently divert billions of dollars from 1MDB through various means.”

The international inquiries into the sovereign wealth fund began last year after an investigative report in The New York Times. As part of a broader examination of the use of shell companies in high-end real estate in the United States, The Times traced the purchases of about $150 million in residential properties in New York and in the Los Angeles area, as well as several works of art, to relatives or associates of Mr. Najib.

The Justice Department named three of those people in its filings. One, Riza Aziz, is the stepson of Mr. Najib and a Hollywood producer of films including “The Wolf of Wall Street.” Another, a financier named Jho Low, is a longtime friend of Mr. Aziz and his family. The third is Mohamed Badawy al-Husseiny, a former official at a government fund in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, that participated in deals with Malaysia’s fund.

The attorney general, Loretta Lynch, announced that the Department of Justice is seeking to recover $1 billion from a Malaysian embezzlement case that was laundered in the United States.

Prosecutors also cited Khadem al-Qubaisi, who was an official at a related fund in the United Arab Emirates, as well as another individual who was an associate of Mr. Low’s.

The people named in the complaint have not been charged with crimes. The defendants in an asset forfeiture case are the properties that the government wants to seize. But an asset complaint does not preclude criminal charges.

The complaints were filed Wednesday morning in federal court in Los Angeles. Mr. Aziz, Mr. Husseiny, Mr. Low and Mr. Qubaisi could not be reached for comment. In the past, representatives for Mr. Aziz and Mr. Low have acknowledged that their clients own United States properties but have said that they did nothing improper.

The complaint does not name Mr. Najib, but it does cite “Malaysian Official 1,” described as a high-ranking government official who oversaw the fund and is a close relative of Mr. Aziz.

Public concern has increased over international corruption and the use of shell companies to hide assets. In the spring, the leak of the so-called Panama Papers cast light on secret offshore accounts held by politicians and other wealthy people from around the world.

The Treasury Department announced recently that it would begin requiring banks to identify customers who use shell companies. And the department began a test program this spring requiring people who buy expensive properties in New York and Miami using cash and shell companies to report their actual identities.

Despite being a leader in enforcement cases involving international bribery, the United States has relatively lenient rules for establishing limited liability companies, known as L.L.C.s, and other types of shell companies. In the case of the Malaysian money, shell companies in Delaware were among those used.

The forfeiture process is lengthy. First, a court must make sure that no other interested party has a valid claim to the properties. Once true ownership is determined, the court must decide whether the money used to buy those assets was, in fact, earned illicitly. Only then can the government permanently seize the assets.

In the nearer term, the government’s action may increase the political pressure on Mr. Najib, who has been under fire since early 2015, as the Malaysian public has become concerned about the corruption allegations and his rivals have sought to oust him.

Mr. Najib has held on to power by halting investigations into the investment fund and by removing officials in his governing party who criticized him. Some outspoken artists and activists who questioned his conduct on social media face criminal charges, and the government has shut down critical online news outlets. Mr. Najib’s strategy has been effective: Candidates from his party won in recent by-elections.

The 1MDB fund was created in 2009 as a “strategic development company” to invest the Malaysian public’s money, primarily its oil wealth, in projects that would benefit the country. Mr. Low helped set up an earlier version of the fund.

The Times reported last year that Mr. Low was secretly involved in major transactions with a small oil company called PetroSaudi International and Malaysia’s public fund, which was led by Mr. Najib in his position as prime minister. Mr. Low then helped the prime minister’s stepson buy property in the United States using shell companies and finance his movie production company, Red Granite Pictures.

The Times investigation described lavish spending by Mr. Low and Mr. Aziz. It also documented property transfers between the two men, including one transfer in Beverly Hills that was done entirely behind the veil of a shell company, with no property transfer filed in public records, as well as the role that Mr. Low played in helping to finance Mr. Aziz’s movie business.

The Justice Department’s complaint described several crucial transactions involving 1MDB, including the one with PetroSaudi. In that transaction, the complaint said, 1MDB officials and their associates stole about $1 billion that was supposed to be used for oil exploration. In addition, more than $2.5 billion was stolen through bond offerings for 1MDB in 2012 and 2013 that were managed by Goldman Sachs, the complaint said.

The complaint described lavish spending by the people said to be involved in the theft of funds. From October 2009 to June 2010, it said, more than $85 million was spent on gambling in Las Vegas, jet rentals, luxury yachts and payments to other individuals.

It said that the $150 million used for luxury properties in New York and California came from the PetroSaudi deal, as did $44.8 million to buy a hotel in Beverly Hills and $35.4 million for a jet. Money from the Goldman Sachs bond deals was illicitly used, along with $130 million in artwork purchased at United States auction houses and an interest in the music rights of EMI, to finance the production of “The Wolf of Wall Street,” prosecutors said.

PetroSaudi, Goldman and 1MDB were not accused of wrongdoing.

The Justice Department has brought other kleptocracy cases against the children of heads of state, including one involving the daughter of the president of Uzbekistan and another involving the son of the president of Equatorial Guinea.

                This entry was posted on Thursday, 21 July 2016, 3:52 am and is filed under
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US billion-dollar action by US DOJ to seize 1MDB-related assets proof that Malaysia is careening down the slope of failed and rogue state which must be stopped by all patriotic Malaysians

I am reminded of the first  SSS Lge (Support, Sympathy, Solidarity with Lim Guan Eng) campaign 19 years ago when Guan Eng was disqualified as Member of Parliament and jailed for 18 months for defending the dignity and human rights of an under-aged Malay girl.

In that period, Guan Eng was first imprisoned and Anwar Ibrahim attended one of the SSS Lge ceramahs together with his wife Dr. Wan Azizah Wan Ismail and his daughter Nurul Izzah, before Anwar was himself imprisoned.

This time, Anwar is in prison and there are people who want Guan Eng to be jailed for one, two, three or even five years.

The common thread of the SSS Lge campaign and the SSS Lge 2.0 campaign spanning a period of some two decades is the need to change the system of governance to ensure that the national institutions in the country are independent, efficient and professional in upholding the values of justice and integrity.

What happened at the other of the world, which has a 12-hour time differential with Malaysia, illustrates the need for the change of our system of governance.

The Reuters has reported that U.S. federal prosecutors have filed civil lawsuits seeking to seize assets worth more than US$1 billion, allegedly stolen from Malaysian state fund 1MDB, which was overseen by Prime Minister Najib Razak.

None of the U.S. lawsuits name Najib but they contain details that appear to directly implicate the prime minister. They include allegations that $681 million from a 2013 bond sale by 1MDB was transferred to the account of “Malaysian Official 1”, who is described in the lawsuits as “a high-ranking official in the Malaysian government who also held a position of authority with 1MDB.

According to the Reuters report, which read a short while ago, the U.S. lawsuits seek to seize assets “involved in and traceable to an international conspiracy to launder money misappropriated from 1MDB”.

The alleged offences were committed over a four-year period and involved multiple individuals, including Malaysian officials and their associates, who conspired to fraudulently divert billions of dollars from 1MDB.

It is the largest set of cases ever brought by the US Department of  Justice (DOJ)’s Kleptocracy Asset Recovery Initiative, which seeks the forfeiture of the proceeds of foreign corruption. The previous largest case in February sought to seize $850 million.

The U.S. lawsuits seek to seize assets “involved in and traceable to an international conspiracy to launder money misappropriated from 1MDB”.

The lawsuits name Najib’s stepson Riza Aziz as a “relevant individual. They  also named Malaysian financier Low Taek Jho, better known as “Jho Low”, and Abu Dhabi government officials Khadem Abdulla Al-Qubaisi and Mohammed Ahmed Badawy Al-Husseiny.

The people named in the complaint have not been charged with crimes – but are  the defendants in the civil lawsuits of the properties the US government wants to seize.

Those include luxury properties in New York and California, paintings by Vincent Van Gogh and Claude Monet, and a Bombardier jet.

Tens of millions of US dollars in funds diverted from 1MDB were used to produce the 2013 Martin Scorsese film “The Wolf of Wall Street,” the lawsuits said. The lawsuits aim to seize proceeds from that film, which was produced by Riza’s Red Granite Pictures.

1MDB, which Najib founded in 2009 shortly after he came to office, is being investigated for money-laundering in at least six countries, including the United States, Singapore and Switzerland.

The US billion-dollar action by US DOJ to seize 1MDB-related assets is eloquent  proof that Malaysia is careening down the slope of failed and rogue state which must be stopped by all patriotic Malaysians.

It has proven the critics of 1MDB scandal, whether DAP MP for PJ Utara, Tony Pua, PKR MP for Pandan, Rafizi Ramli, former Deputy Prime Minister, Tan Sri Muhyiddin Yassin , the former Minister for Rural and Regional Development, Datuk Seri Shafie Apdal, the former Kedah Mentri Besar Datuk Mukriz Mahathir, and former Prime Minister, Tun Mahathir Mohamed right and vindicated in trying to raise alarm that Najib’s RM55 billion and RM4.2 billion “donation” mega scandals are global in magnitude and to demand full and proper accountability.

It proved that former UMNO leader Datuk Seri Khairuddin Abu Hassan was right and a patriot when he went on a global tour to solicit investigations by other countries into 1MDB scandal, until he was stopped by the police through gross abuses of power like his arbitrary detention  under a variety of ludicrous charges, including terrorism and activities detrimental to  parliamentary democracy.

This is a system which represents a travesty of justice which must be reformed, and this is what the SSS Lge 2.0 campaign seeks to do, to create greater national awareness to demand  reforms and institutional change in our country – it is not just about Lim Guan Eng but the basic rights and interests of 30 million Malaysians regardless of race, religion or region.

(Speech at  the first SSS Lge (Support, Sympathy and Solidarity with Lim Guan Eng) 2.0 ceramah in Seremban on Wednesday, 20th July 2016 at 9.30 pm)

                This entry was posted on Thursday, 21 July 2016, 3:29 am and is filed under
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US moves to seize $1bn in Malaysia assets

David J Lynch in Washington

Financial Times

20.7.2016

Van Gogh paintings, Beverly Hills properties and the rights to profits from the hit movie The Wolf of Wall Street were among $1bn in assets US prosecutors moved to seize on Wednesday as part of a sprawling anti-money laundering investigation into Malaysia’s sovereign wealth fund.

In one of the largest seizures in US history, federal law enforcement agents also appeared to link Najib Razak, Malaysia’s prime minister, to a web of corrupt officials receiving stolen funds.

The US justice department case represents the most detailed and sweeping allegations to be brought in the multinational probe into a global scheme to siphon more than $3.5bn from the Malaysian government fund, known as 1MDB.

It is also the first time Mr Najib has been officially tied to the scandal. Mr Najib is not identified by name in court documents but the description of a “Malaysian Official 1” matches his biography and job responsibilities. On several occasions, that official received funds misappropriated from 1MDB, prosecutors say. Mr Najib has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing.

1MDB was created in 2009 as a government-owned vehicle to promote economic development through global partnerships and foreign investment.

But funds intended to benefit the Malaysian people were instead diverted to buy real estate, works of art and jewellery, pay casino bills and hire musicians and celebrities for the conspirators’ “lavish lifestyles”, the complaint says. More than $200m was spent on art alone, prosecutors allege.

A spokesman for the Malaysian government said a statement would be made later.

The case accuses Malaysian officials and business executives with receiving laundered 1MDB funds through banks in Singapore, Switzerland, Luxembourg and New York. The Malaysian officials “treated this public trust as a personal bank account”, said Lorretta Lynch, US attorney-general.

The misappropriation occurred over four years beginning shortly after Mr Najib set up the fund in 2009, according to the complaint.

It alleges that in March 2013, $681m in proceeds from a 1MDB bond offering were transferred into an account belonging to the official matching Mr Najib’s description. Five months later, $620m of that amount was shifted to a different account to which a 1MDB official was an authorised signatory.

Likewise, the proceeds of two 2012 bond offerings were diverted to “make substantial payments” to the Malaysian official and others, prosecutors say.

The filings also quote a Malaysian attorney-general description in January 2016 of a transaction in those amounts involving Mr Najib, which describes the money as a “personal donation” to him from the Saudi royal family.

At the centre of the action is Taek Jho Low, a Malaysian businessman also known as Jho Low, who held no formal role with the fund but was deeply involved in its operations, the complaint says. Mr Low has denied any role in the fund after its creation.

Officials at 1MDB and others began diverting money shortly after the fund was created in September 2009 under the guise of investing in a joint venture with a private Saudi oil extraction company, PetroSaudi International. More than $1bn was transferred to a Swiss bank account held by Good Star Ltd, which was owned by Mr Low, prosecutors allege.

The misdirected monies “were used for the personal gratification of Low and his associates”, the complaint alleges.

In 2012, 1MDB officials and others fraudulently diverted $1.4bn in proceeds from two bond offerings arranged by Goldman Sachs, according to the complaint. Representing almost 40 per cent of the total raised, the funds were transferred to a Swiss account controlled by a British Virgin Islands entity called Aabar Investments PJS Limited.

Aabar had been named to suggest a relationship with an Abu Dhabi company, Aabar Investments PJS, an investment arm of the Abu Dhabi government. But funds diverted to the Swiss account ultimately ended up in a Singapore bank account controlled by an associate of Mr Low.

In 2013, several officials including those from 1MDB diverted nearly $1.3bn from another $3bn Goldman bond offering.

The money was supposed to be used to finance a joint venture known as the Abu Dhabi Malaysia Investment Co but was instead funnelled into a Singapore account controlled by Mr Low’s associate, the complaint says.

Andrew McCabe, FBI deputy director, said at a press conference in Washington: “The Malaysian people were defrauded on an enormous scale.”

As well as the official fitting Mr Najib’s description, the complaint lists four other 1MDB officials. None is identified by name.

                This entry was posted on Thursday, 21 July 2016, 4:30 am and is filed under
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I am not “Malaysian Official 1”. Will Najib deny that he is “Malaysia Official 1”?

Although  never intended to be taken seriously, the speculation sparked by the US Department of Justice’s (DOJ) legal suit to seize more than US$1 billion assets stolen from 1MDB about the identity of the kingpin of the 1MDB scandal, described merely as “Malaysian Official 1”, included the lighted-hearted one as to whether I could be “Malaysian Official 1”.

But this is a very serious matter, involving the country’s honour and international reputation.

Let me clearly and formally declare that I am not  the “Malaysian Official 1.”

Will the Prime Minister, Datuk Seri Najib Razak similarly state his position –  to formally deny it or confirm whether he is referred to as  “Malaysian Official 1” and if the latter, what he proposes to do about the DOJ action.

Anyone who reads the 136-page DOJ lawsuit will have no doubt about the identity of “Malaysian Official 1”, as the description in  Paragraph 39 can only point to one person, Datuk Seri Najib Razak.

Paragraph 39 of the 405-paragraph DOJ lawsuit reads:

“39. Upon its (1MDB) formation, MALAYSIAN OFFICIAL 1 assumed a position of authority with 1MDB.  MALAYSIAN OFFICIAL 1 had the authority to approve all appointments to, and removal from, 1MDB’s Board of Directors and 1MDB’s Senior Management Team.  In addition, any financial commitments by 1MDB, including investments, that were likely to affect a guarantee given by the government of Malaysia for the benefit of 1MDB or any policy of the Malaysian government, required, the approval of MALAYSIAN OFFICIAL 1.”

What is being referred to by US DOJ is  obviously Clause 117 of the 1MDB Memorandum and Articles of Association (M&A) Agreement where  the Prime Minister must give his written approval for any of 1MDB deals, including the firm’s investments or any bid for restructuring.

The clause states that for any avoidance of doubt, none of three things can be executed “without the written prior approval of the prime minister”.

This includes “any financial commitment (including investment), restructuring or any other matter which is likely to affect the guarantee given by the Federal Government of Malaysia for the benefit of the company, national interest, national security or any policy of the Federal Government of Malaysia”.

The clause also stipulates that the government shall have the “final and conclusive” right to determine what constitutes national interest and national security.

Other matters which need the PM’s approval are amendments to the company’s Memorandum and Articles of Association of the Company and appointments and removal of directors and senior management team of the company.

Will Najib deny that he is the “MALAYSIAN OFFICIAL 1” referred to by the US DOJ in its legal suit to seize more than US$1 billion assets “stolen from 1MDB”?

In her press conference on Wednesday, the US Attorney-General Loretta E. Lynch said:

“The Department of Justice will not allow the American financial system to be used as a conduit for corruption.

“With this action, we are seeking to forfeit and recover funds that were intended to grow the Malaysian economy and support the Malaysian people.  Instead, they were stolen, laundered through American financial institutions and used to enrich a few officials and their associates.  Corrupt officials around the world should make no mistake that we will be relentless in our efforts to deny them the proceeds of their crimes. ”

Loretta  said that the ultimate goal of the US Government  action under the US Kleptocracy Assets Recovery Initiative 2010  is to return the funds believed to have been misappropriated from 1MDB to the people of Malaysia.

The Foreign Minister, Datuk Anifah Aman met the US Ambassador to Malaysia, Joseph Y. Yun at his Ministry over the US DOJ legal action yesterday.

Did he tell the US Ambassador that the US DOJ is barking up the wrong tree, that as the Attorney-General Tan Sri Mohamad Apandi Ali stated yesterday, no money had been misappropriated or stolen from 1MDB – and that Malaysia will not accept the funds and assets even if they are successfully recovered by the US DOJ on behalf of the Malaysian people?

                This entry was posted on Friday, 22 July 2016, 2:56 pm and is filed under
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The 136-page US DOJ suit to recover more than US$1 billion 1MDB-linked assets under US Kleptocracy Assets Recovery Initiative 2010 fully vindicated my April comments that PAC Report on 1MDB was only “tip of the iceberg”

The 136-page United States Department of Justice (DO)’s  legal suit to recover more than US$1 billion 1MDB-linked assets under the US Kleptocracy Assets Recovery Initiative 2010 has fully vindicated my April comments that the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) Report on 1MDB scandal dealt only the “tip of the iceberg”.

In my media statement on April 8, 2016,  the day after the PAC Report was tabled in Parliament without the Auditor-General’s Report on 1MDB although it was an integral part of the PAC Report and proceedings, I said the PAC Report had not laid to rest or rebut in any manner international perceptions that Malaysia had become one of the world’s top nations in global corruption.

I said:  “In fact, the PAC report will only confirm these international perceptions and doubts, which is why the 1MDB scandal is the subject of separate investigations by half a dozen countries, including the subject of the US Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) and Department of Justice (DOJ) under the US Kleptocracy Assets Recovery Initiative, and none of them will halt investigations because of the PAC Report.”

I said at the time that  what was important was the “next step” – “how to probe further than just the ‘tip of of the iceberg’ – a job which other countries of the world will do if Malaysians themselves are not up to it to get to the bottom of the truth of the 1MDB scandal, which will be to the eternal shame of Malaysia!”

My brutal forecast has come to pass.

For over three months after the PAC report was tabled in Parliament, the national  investigative and enforcement agencies, whether the Police, the Attorney-General’s Chambers, Bank Negara or the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission, had  been very perfunctory, lackadaisical or even indifferent to the meek,  grossly inadequate and incommensurate recommendations of the PAC Report on the 1MDB scandal.

The DOJ’s  136-page 513-paragraph suit to recover more than US$1 billion assets stolen from 1MDB, the national sovereign wealth fund, has done Malaysia a great national service, for it allowed more  parts of the 1MDB iceberg to surface – a task which should be performed by the various national investigative and enforcement agencies in the country, but which they failed miserably to do or been prevented from discharging their national duties and responsibilities.

The DOJ’s 136-page suit to recover more than US$1 billion of assets stolen or misappropriated from 1MDB should be compulsory  reading not only for  all Ministers, Members of Parliament, State Assembly representatives and all  political leaders, but all concerned and patriotic Malaysians, for it is a “horror story” as to how tens of billions of ringgit of public funds and assets had been laundered,  stolen and misappropriated in an international conspiracy against the 1MDB and the people of Malaysia.

As the US Attorney-General Loretta E. Lynch said two days ago,  the DOJ action seeks to  “forfeit and recover funds” that were intended to grow the Malaysian economy and support the Malaysian people.  Instead, they were stolen, laundered through American financial institutions and used to enrich a few officials and their associates.

Such an action against the corruption, theft and misappropriation of billions of ringgit of funds and assets which belong to the people of Malaysia  should have been instituted by the Malaysian government, and it must be cause of great and eternal  shame and humiliation that instead of supporting such an action, the Malaysian Government is quite opposed to it.

The Attorney-General Tan Sri Apandi Ali said that there is currently no evidence that money had been misappropriated from 1MDB.

Apandi should read the US DOJ’s 136-page legal suit as it is replete with such evidence.

The Prime Minister, Datuk Seri Najib Razak said no assumptions should be made in regard to the US DOJ’s crackdown on siphoning of funds from 1MDB until the legal process is completed.

This is a most lame and unsatisfactory “cop-out”, when Malaysians are entitled to an official explanation for every item in the hosts of instances of theft and misappropriation of 1MDB funds and assets, exceeding the value of  RM10 billion ringgit, which are catalogued in the US DOJ legal suit.

The  DOJ  civil suit under the US Kleptocracy Assets Recovery Initiative 2010  to seize over US$1 billion assets stolen and misappropriated from 1MDB list a whole catalogue of criminal activities leading to such money-laundering, embezzlement and corruption of 1MDB funds which would keep a high-powered police team busy for years to bring the criminals to book – provided  the police are serious about upholding law and order and there is rule of law in Malaysia!

(Speech at the Skudai DAP Branch, Johor on Friday, July 22, 2016 at 9 pm)

                This entry was posted on Saturday, 23 July 2016, 11:23 am and is filed under
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Decision Time on Malaysia’s 1MDB

Wall Street Journal

OPINION  REVIEW & OUTLOOK

July 21, 2016

Losses of billions of dollars will catch up with Najib Razak.

U.S. prosecutors on Wednesday linked Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak to hundreds of millions of dollars they believe were stolen from the Malaysian state-owned investment fund 1MDB. The Justice Department filed a lawsuit to freeze more than $1 billion in assets from people connected to Mr. Najib, including his stepson Riza Aziz. The individuals named in the complaint allegedly used the money to buy real estate, artworks and other baubles of the jet set.

Mr. Najib denies all wrongdoing and spokesmen have dismissed critics as part of a conspiracy to overthrow an elected leader. Mr. Najib has previously said that $681 million that ended up in his personal accounts was a legal political donation from Saudi Arabia that was later mostly returned.

But Mr. Najib can’t escape responsibility if it is proved that national wealth held by 1MDB disappeared on his watch. He launched 1MDB in 2009, served as chairman of the advisory board, and oversaw it as Prime Minister and, concurrently, Finance Minister. The evidence of fraud connected to 1MDB from investigations in the U.S., Singapore, Switzerland and at least four other countries is damning. The U.S. Justice Department put the losses at $3.5 billion on Wednesday. The Swiss Attorney General’s office said earlier this year it suspects $4 billion was misappropriated.

Justice describes one of the people mentioned in the lawsuitas “Malaysian Official 1,” who allegedly received hundreds of millions of dollars from 1MDB. Details about him match Mr. Najib, and a person with direct knowledge of the investigation confirmed to the Journal that it refers to the Malaysian Prime Minister.

On Thursday Singapore’s central bank, police and Attorney General’s office announced the seizure of $178 million in assets from 1MDB, half of which was in the hands of Malaysian financier Jho Low and his family. Mr. Low helped set up 1MDB, has sold properties to Mr. Aziz and is named in the U.S. government’s lawsuit.

The Monetary Authority of Singapore and the Swiss Attorney General are investigating financial institutions that helped transfer 1MDB’s money into private shell companies. On Thursday the MAS cited three banks—DBS Bank, Standard Chartered and UBS—for serious lapses in following antimoney laundering regulations. Swiss private bank BSI was earlier fined in both countries and faces criminal charges in Switzerland.

Mr. Najib promised an independent probe into 1MDB in March 2015. But so far Malaysian authorities haven’t charged anybody for crimes related to 1MDB or penalized any financial institutions.

Instead, officials who tried to investigate 1MDB were sidelined. Attorney General Abdul Gani Patail was on the verge of bringing charges against Mr. Najib last summer when he was forced to resign for “health reasons.” Mohamed Apandi Ali replaced him and cleared Mr. Najib of wrongdoing in January. Abu Kassim Mohamed, chief commissioner of the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission, had advised prosecutors to charge Mr. Najib and was investigating 1MDB until last month, when the government announced he would move to a lower post.

The stonewalling reflects Mr. Najib’s strong political position at home. He has played the nationalism card to portray himself as a victim of foreign forces, used repressive laws to silence critics in the press and opposition, and expelled dissidents from his party. The opposition is fragmented.

Mr. Najib is riding high after his ruling United Malays National Organization coalition won two by-elections last month and a state election in Sarawak in May. Although a general election isn’t due until the middle of 2018, he is rumored to be considering a snap election to force the party to back him. Mr. Najib has also been helped at home by the appearance of close ties to U.S. President Obama, who invited him for a golf outing and ostentatious photo-op in Hawaii in December 2014.

But UMNO politicians should be having second thoughts. Mr. Obama is a short-timer, and the U.S. lawsuit makes clear that Mr. Najib’s position as a moderate Muslim ally won’t shield him or Malaysia from legal actions. The 1MDB losses will eventually catch up with him and his allies.

The longer UMNO waits to disavow Mr. Najib, the more likely the opposition is to regroup by the time the 1MDB fallout hits. Former Deputy Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin is publicly mulling the formation of a new, cleaner version of UMNO. That could be the chance for reform-minded members of the ruling party to step off Mr. Najib’s sinking ship.

                This entry was posted on Sunday, 24 July 2016, 4:21 am and is filed under
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Give Shabery Cheek the benefit of the doubt for making such an embarrassing statement – let him read the 136-page DOJ suit to confiscate over US$1 billion of 1MDB-linked assets in US and declare whether he would say the same thing

Let us give the Minister for Agriculture and Agro-based Industries, Datuk Ahmad Shabery Cheek, who is former university lecturer,  the benefit of the doubt that he had neither the time nor opportunity to read the US Department of Justice (DOJ)’s 136-page civil suits filed four days ago under the US Kleptocracy Assets Recovery Initiative 2010 to confiscate over US$1 billion of 1MDB-linked assets in the United States as to make such a “irresponsible”, “outrageous”, “desperate” and “embarrassing” statement (terms rightly used by PKR central committee member Latheefa Koya) that the DOJ legal suits were a “normal matter”.

Let Shabery read and digest what are in the DOJ’s 136-page legal suits for civil forfeiture against assets allegedly bought with money looted from Malaysia’s sovereign wealth fund, 1MDB.

The DOJ said that more than US$3.5 billion (RM14.2 billion) was misappropriated from 1MDB but the forfeiture action targeted about US1 billion in assets located in the United States, the United Kingdom and Switzerland which include mansions and penthouses, a US$35 million executive jet and artwork.

The DOJ said the assets are “traceable to an international conspiracy to launder money misappropriated from 1MDB.”

Let Shabery read the DOJ’s legal suits and then declare whether he would stand by what he had said, that US DOJ’s civil forfeiture actions seeking to impound assets acquired from funds allegedly embezzled from government investment arm 1MDB is nothing out of the ordinary when it comes to the Malaysian government.

Shabery had said: “What happened is a normal matter in the country’s administration. In fact, we have been faced with a situation which is bigger, like the Bumiputra Malaysia Finance (BMF) scandal.”

The various Cabinet Ministers who have publicly commented on the US DOJ civil suits in the past three days have no impressed Malaysians of their patriotism, love of the country or intellectual depth.

We should give all Ministers the benefit of the doubt that they had not fully read, digested or  understood the “tales of infamy and hosts of horrors” about massive and monstrous global theft, embezzlement, money-laundering and corruption of the 1MDB funds of the Malaysian people contained  in the DOJ’s 136-page legal action when some of them made half-cocked or other embarrassing comments.

All the Ministers should read the DOJ’s 136-page legal action and put it as the top item of Cabinet agenda on Wednesday, 27th July 2016, and  take a decision as to what the Cabinet should do on the United States DOJ legal suits –  putting national interests above all other interests whether  personal, party and coalition.

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Justice Dept. Rejects Account of How Malaysia’s Leader Acquired Millions

By RICHARD C. PADDOCK

New York Times

JULY 22, 2016

BANGKOK — A United States Justice Department complaint filed in federal court this week directly contradicts repeated assertions by the Malaysian prime minister, Najib Razak, about the origins and purpose of hundreds of millions of dollars that ended up in his personal bank accounts.

While Mr. Najib and other Malaysian officials have insisted that the money was a gift from an unidentified Saudi donor, the Justice Department said that it was stolen from a Malaysian government investment fund that Mr. Najib oversaw. Mr. Najib has said he never received any money from the fund.

The court filing, one of several complaints filed Wednesday in a federal money-laundering investigation, provides the first official public documentation of transactions that challenge Mr. Najib’s version of events in a scandal that has battered his government for the past year.

The revelations could undermine his credibility and give new ammunition to a movement to force him from office. However, he maintains firm control over his governing party and has successfully stifled opposition with the firing of critics from party posts, the closing of online news outlets and the criminal prosecution of social media detractors and political opponents.

Mr. Najib, who has acknowledged receiving the money but said he broke no laws and took nothing for personal gain, told reporters on Thursday that his government would “fully cooperate” with the Justice Department action.

“Allow the process to take its course,” he said, “but I want to say categorically that we are serious about good governance.”

A spokesman for Mr. Najib, reached late Thursday, said that the prime minister had not changed his position that the money he received was a gift from a Saudi donor and that he gave most of it back because he did not need it.

The Justice Department complaint alleges in 136 pages of blow-by-blow detail that huge sums were diverted from the government fund, routed through bank accounts in various countries and then spent on high-end real estate, artwork, gambling and various luxury goods by Mr. Najib’s stepson, friends and associates.

The Justice Department filed a complaint on Wednesday in federal court in California to seize $1 billion dollars in assets said to be stolen from Malaysia’s sovereign wealth fund. Here is the complete court filing.

 OPEN DOCUMENT

The court filing seeks to recover more than $1 billion in assets bought with money that prosecutors say was stolen from the fund, known as 1Malaysia Development Berhad, or 1MDB.

Those assets, Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch said Wednesday, “are just a portion of the more than $3 billion that was stolen from 1MDB and laundered through American financial institutions in violation of United States law.”

The case, she said, should be seen as a sign of the country’s “firm commitment to fighting international corruption” and the department’s determination “to protect the American financial system from being used as a conduit for corruption.”

The United States is among several governments, including Malaysia, Singapore and Switzerland, that have investigated 1MDB. The inquiries began last year after an investigative report in The New York Times traced the purchases of about $150 million in residential properties and artwork in the United States to relatives or associates of Mr. Najib.

While the federal complaint does not identify Mr. Najib by name, it cites $731 million in funds that came from 1MDB that were deposited into accounts belonging to a government official identified as “Malaysian Official 1.”

However, Mr. Najib is clearly recognizable in the descriptions and actions attributed to that official.

Large transactions by “Malaysian Official 1” described in the complaint are identical to those previously acknowledged by Mr. Najib. The complaint describes the official’s role in managing the fund, which matches Mr. Najib’s role. And it says “Malaysian Official 1” is a relative of Riza Aziz, Mr. Najib’s stepson.

A person with knowledge of the case, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly, confirmed that “Malaysian Official 1” was Mr. Najib.

The complaint does name Mr. Aziz, and a family friend, Jho Low, who played a key role in establishing the fund. Both are cited as possessing assets bought with money stolen from 1MDB.

Mr. Najib’s advisers have said Mr. Najib received about $1 billion in 2013, most of it donations from a member of the Saudi royal family to help him fight a tough election campaign that year.

That explanation of a Saudi gift was repeated by Mr. Najib’s attorney general, Mohamed Apandi Ali, who closed a government investigation into the money in January saying that he had found no evidence of wrongdoing.

On Thursday, Mr. Apandi issued a statement asserting that no investigation had found evidence that 1MDB funds had been misappropriated. He said he had “strong concerns at the insinuations and allegations” against Mr. Najib in the Justice Department complaint.

The Saudi gift was also confirmed by Saudi Arabia.

Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir told reporters in April that Mr. Najib had received a “genuine donation” from a Saudi donor. He did not specify the amount or provide any details.

A Saudi Foreign Ministry spokesman did not respond Friday to requests for comment.

The Justice Department complaint mentions no such gift.

The complaint says that $681 million transferred to Mr. Najib in 2013 came from a Singapore bank account held in the name of Tanore Finance Corporation. It says the money originated from $3 billion in bonds underwritten for 1MDB by Goldman Sachs.

The Singapore account was controlled by Tan Kim Loong, also known as Eric Tan, an associate of Mr. Low, the complaint says.

Four months after receiving the $681 million, Mr. Najib transferred $620 million back to the same Tanore account, according to the complaint.

The complaint offers no explanation for why the prime minister received the money, held it for four months, then returned part of it. It is also unclear what happened to the $61 million he kept, although advisers have said he needed money for parliamentary elections that year.

Mr. Low and Mr. Tan used money from the Tanore account to buy expensive artwork and an interest in the Park Lane Hotel, a luxury hotel overlooking Central Park in Manhattan, the complaint says.

The complaint also says that “Malaysian Official 1” received $20 million in stolen 1MDB funds in 2011. The money, the first he received from the fund, was transferred from an account held in the name of a Saudi prince, the complaint says. It does not identify the prince.

He received $30 million in 1MDB money in 2012 from a separate account, the complaint says.

The prime minister’s office did not respond to inquiries about those two deposits.

The two transactions bring to $731 million the amount of money Mr. Najib is said to have received from the government fund he oversaw.

Mr. Najib created 1MDB in 2009 to promote Malaysia’s economic development. He oversaw the fund as chairman of its advisory board, a position he recently relinquished, and as finance minister, a position he still holds. The fund is wholly owned by the Finance Ministry.

The fund’s goal was “improving the well-being of the Malaysian people,” Ms. Lynch said in announcing the civil action. “But unfortunately, sadly, tragically, a number of corrupt 1MDB officials treated this public trust as a personal bank account.”

The F.B.I. and the Internal Revenue Service took part in the investigation and relied in part on bank transfer data, 1MDB memos and internal emails. Special Agent Darryl Wegner, chief of the F.B.I.’s International Corruption Unit, said that leaders of the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission showed “tremendous courage” in pursuing the investigation.

The Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission’s investigation was shut down by Malaysia’s attorney general.

In Washington, the White House spokesman Josh Earnest said Thursday that President Obama had discussed the scandal with Mr. Najib during a visit to Malaysia last fall.

“The president reiterated how important it is, particularly for a fast-growing country like Malaysia, to be transparent, to demonstrate a commitment to fair play and good government and a business climate that will allow that country’s economy to continue to succeed,” Mr. Earnest said.

                This entry was posted on Sunday, 24 July 2016, 3:21 am and is filed under
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Malaysia fiasco undercuts Goldman’s standards push

By Una Galani

Breakingviews

Reuters

July 22, 2016

Malaysia’s sovereign fund scandal has exposed shortcomings in Goldman Sachs’ post-crisis overhaul of its business practices. Five years ago, the Wall Street firm led by Lloyd Blankfein went to great lengths to assure regulators, investors and clients that it was tightening up standards. But its dealings with the now disgraced 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB) cast doubt on the depth of Goldman’s changes.

An attempt by the U.S. Department of Justice to seize assets bought with some of the $3.5 billion it says was stolen from 1MDB offer the clearest account yet of the bank’s deep relationship with the Malaysian fund. Though Goldman has not been accused of any wrongdoing, its name appears frequently in lawsuits that detail a complex web of fraudulent transactions over several years.

Back in 2009, Goldman helped set up the fund which counted Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak as its top advisor. An excerpt of an email suggests that, from the very start, Goldman executives were concerned about the issue of transparency at the new fund and its reliance on borrowed money. By the time the bank started raising money for 1MDB in earnest three years later, corrupt officials had already sucked around $1 billion from the fund, the legal documents show.

Nevertheless, between 2012 and 2013 Goldman helped 1MDB raise $6.5 billion by issuing three bonds. The Justice Department suggests that around 40 percent of that money was siphoned off, and indicates that $681 million ultimately found its way into Najib’s personal bank account, though the prime minister is not directly named.

Some of the rest of the funds taken from 1MDB ended up in a Bombardier jet, artwork by Monet, an interest in EMI Music Publishing, prime real estate in Beverly Hills, and the movie “The Wolf of Wall Street”.

The relationship with 1MDB was highly lucrative for Goldman. In total, the bank earned roughly $590 million in fees, commissions and expenses, according to the legal filings – far more than a bank would normally expect to earn on bond deals for a quasi-sovereign client. Goldman was able to charge more because it put its balance sheet at risk by buying the bonds from 1MDB before selling them on to other investors. One of the bond offerings was given the code name “Project Maximus”.

1MDB says that it has not been contacted by the Justice Department or any other foreign agency in relation to their investigations. Najib’s press secretary said in a statement that the law will be enforced without exception if any wrongdoing is proved.

For its part, Goldman says it had no visibility on whether the funds it raised for 1MDB were diverted for other purposes. The bank has previously stressed that its fees were commensurate with the risk it assumed and that it did proper due diligence on 1MDB.

Nonetheless, the transactions may yet drag Goldman into a criminal investigation. U.S. law enforcement officials are probing whether the bank failed to comply with the U.S. Bank Secrecy Act with regards to its fundraising for 1MDB, according to a person familiar with the situation. The Act requires financial institutions to report suspicious transactions to regulators.

Whatever the outcome of the ongoing investigations, however, Goldman’s reputation has already taken a savage beating. This was exactly the kind of mess it was trying to avoid by overhauling its standards following the financial crisis.

Around the time that the bank agreed in 2010 to pay $550 million to settle charges it improperly sold a product linked to subprime mortgages, chairman and Chief Executive Blankfein launched a global review to strengthen the firm’s practices and culture. The following year, Goldman published a 63-page document with 39 recommendations designed to ensure its bankers and traders paid as much attention to reputational risks as financial ones.

Goldman says Blankfein dedicated more time to reinforcing the message about personal accountability, client service and reputational risk management with employees than to any other initiative in 2011 and early 2012.

Moreover, a 28-page assessment of the reforms published by Goldman in 2013 claimed the bank’s approach to transactions was now “fundamentally different”. Committees that approve individual transactions were required to vet deals more vigorously and differentiate “from those we could have done, but should not do, to transactions that we both can and should do”.

It is impossible for outsiders to understand all that transpired inside Goldman while it was vetting the 1MDB deals. But plenty of warning signs were visible. The three most obvious were that a quasi-sovereign client wanted to raise a large amount of money at short notice, was willing to pay hefty fees, and directed the proceeds to a small Swiss private bank.

Goldman’s top bankers doubtless had a vigorous debate about the merits and structure of the various 1MDB bonds. The bank did propose cheaper ways for the sovereign fund to raise cash, according to a person familiar with the situation. On one occasion, it insisted that 1MDB went to rival banks to seek alternative pricing. Nevertheless, the transactions still went ahead.

The 1MDB saga does not invalidate Goldman’s efforts to reform the way it does business around the world. But the Malaysia mess does raise questions about the depth of these reforms – and serves as a reminder about how hard it is to change a bank’s culture.

                This entry was posted on Sunday, 24 July 2016, 3:39 am and is filed under
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Malaysia has been betrayed by Prime Minister Najib Razak

Dr. Azeem Ibrahim

Alarabiya.net

22 July 2016

I have argued time and again that the greatest threat to the Muslim world is not the West, but rather, corruption and incompetence in administration in the Muslim countries themselves.

To this argument there were a number of crucial pieces of evidence. First of all, there is a clear inverse correlation between corruption and economic development not just in the Middle East, but globally. Secondly, Muslim countries are among the most corrupt countries in the world, and this maps well to the problems we know well from the region.

In this sense, the abundance of natural resources has served to mask much of the problem, as per capita wealth in the region comes out as much higher than it would have been for a given level of corruption, and that distorts the perception of societal problems in these countries.

For another, that abundance of wealth can be used to buy off the acquiescence of the population to an otherwise questionable regime, as is the case with the benefits that these states lavish upon their population, or alternatively, can be used to fund extensive repressive police and intelligence apparatuses to keep the population in check, as was the case in Saddam-era Iraq.

But there was also plenty of converse evidence, specifically states on the periphery of the Islamic world which did not conform the region’s reputation for corruption. Most notably, we had the examples of Turkey and of Malaysia.

Malaysia is a secure and naturally wealthy country with a track record of success in development and is suffering entirely from self-inflicted wounds

In both the cases, the countries have inherited and sustained over the span of the 20th century an ethos of modernism and civic-mindedness which emulated that in the successful countries in the West. And they reaped the benefits of social and political stability, and economic development, both having been the most economically developed Islamic countries in international rankings.

But I fear we are about to be witnesses to a very cruel experiment, which I believe will prove my argument. It is yet too early to make a definitive judgement on the direction Turkey is heading in after the failed coup of the other week, even if the omens do not look good.

Breakdown of institutional functioning

In the case of Malaysia, we are already seeing the breakdown in institutional functioning and credibility which will likely see the country join the other Middle Eastern countries in the infamous club of corrupt and barely functioning states.

Malaysia has been betrayed not so much by its institutional traditions, as by its populist Prime Minister Najib Razak. He has ridden a wave of popular support into power on the back of promises for economic liberalization, and growth and opportunity, but has seemingly wasted no time in milking the state dry for his own personal gain and the gain of his family.

An ongoing Wall Street Journal investigation is looking into evidence that as much as $1 billion has been siphoned into the prime minister and his relatives’ bank accounts, most of it from the coffers of the Malaysian sovereign wealth fund 1MDB, allegedly started by Mr Razak soon after he took charge in the country in 2009. And a further $5 billion are unaccounted for.

Neither Turkey nor Malaysia can hide behind the usual excuses about Western intervention or historical colonial crimes. Both have come into the post WW2 world as confident, independent nations, and both carved a way in the world for themselves through hard work and diligence, efforts which have yielded a good life to the majority of their citizens.

Turkey currently finds itself in a complex political, economic and security crisis from which we cannot draw too many general conclusions. But Malaysia is suffering entirely from self-inflicted wounds. It is a secure and naturally wealthy country with a track record of success in development. But it has let its guard down, and has let corruption infest the highest levels of government.

Malaysian civil society must now take firm and immediate action to put the country back on track. If not, I fear that the country will tragically end up as the perfect case study into how the problems of the Islamic world stem primarily from domestic corruption.

________________________

Azeem Ibrahim is an RAI Fellow at Mansfield College, University of Oxford and Research Professor at the Strategic Studies Institute, US Army War College. He completed his PhD from the University of Cambridge and served as an International Security Fellow at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and a World Fellow at Yale. Over the years he has met and advised numerous world leaders on policy development and was ranked as a Top 100 Global Thinker by the European Social Think Tank in 2010 and a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum.

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Malaysia Leader Under Pressure From U.S. Lawsuit Over 1MDB Assets

By JAKE MAXWELL WATTS in Singapore and  YANTOULTRA NGUI and CELINE FERNANDEZ in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

Wall Street Journal

July 21, 2016

Prime Minister Najib Razak faced fresh calls to resign Thursday after the U.S. moved to seize more than $1 billion of assets allegedly siphoned from a development fund he founded. But with elections likely years away, Malaysia’s well-entrenched leader looked set to easily weather the latest storm.

The U.S. Justice Department filed a civil lawsuit Wednesday seeking to seize assets it said were part of “an international conspiracy to launder money’’ misappropriated from 1Malaysia Development Bhd., or 1MDB.

Authorities in Singapore, Malaysia’s wealthy neighbor, followed on Thursday by saying they had seized bank accounts and placed restrictions on property transactions worth a combined 240 million Singapore dollars (US$178 million) as part of their own probe into 1MDB.

A request for comment from Mr. Najib’s office went unanswered on Thursday. Earlier, his office said it would fully cooperate with any lawful investigation in line with international protocols.

In the wake of the U.S. announcement, Malaysian opposition lawmaker Tony Pua said his country had “become the global laughingstock.”

Other opponents of Mr. Najib called for his resignation.

“It would be better for the prime minister to step down,” said Kamarul Azman Habibur Rahman, who was expelled from Mr. Najib’s ruling United Malays National Organization (UMNO) this year for criticizing the leader’s handling of Malaysia’s own 1MDB investigations. “If he refuses to step down he is only going to put the party in jeopardy.”

Mr. Najib has been prime minister of this Southeast Asian country since 2009 and is fairly secure in the post due to a divided opposition, weak media and the effective sidelining of opponents within his party.

The UMNO has been at the center of every government since independence in 1957, and remains popular with the Malay Muslim majority through its control of public spending and patronage. The ruling coalition, the National Front, won an important state election in May.

In the past year The Wall Street Journal, citing Malaysian and global investigations, has reported how investigators have traced hundreds of millions of dollars that originated at 1MDB that have been spent to buy artwork, high-end properties and fund a Hollywood movie.

Investigators found that over $1 billion was transferred to Mr. Najib’s personal bank accounts, the majority originating from 1MDB and moving via a web of intermediaries.

In April a parliamentary committee in Malaysia found that billions of dollars had gone missing from 1MDB and recommended that the fund’s senior management face a criminal investigation, but spared Mr. Najib.

Investigations ordered by Mr. Najib into graft allegations at 1MDB were undermined by political pressure and a lack of transparency, according to documents and interviews with people involved, the Journal reported in May.

Mr. Najib’s office has said it believes the Journal’s reporting is part of a politically motivated campaign to unseat him.

Mr. Najib, who was until May the chairman of 1MDB’s board of advisers, has denied any wrongdoing. The Malaysian attorney general has cleared him of wrongdoing, saying the funds that went into Mr. Najib’s account were a legal political donation from Saudi Arabia, and that most of the money was returned. Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister said in April he was “aware” of a “genuine donation” to Mr. Najib, but didn’t elaborate.

“The past one year has demonstrated [that] news such as this does not resonate a lot, especially in the rural areas where Mr. Najib’s government is deriving most of its support,” said Oh Ei Sun, Mr. Najib’s former political secretary and a fellow at the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.

Mr. Najib’s ruling coalition won a comfortable victory in 2013 and doesn’t face a new election until 2018 at the latest. In the interim, the most popular opposition politician, Anwar Ibrahim, is behind bars on a sodomy conviction that he has said was politically motivated.

“Politically, Mr. Najib’s position is stable. Most of his opponents in his party have already been dismissed. Meanwhile the opposition is divided among themselves for lack of leadership and common goals,” said Ibrahim Suffian, head of independent polling organization Merdeka Center.

Malaysia has traditionally kept a close rein on the mainstream press. Two of the country’s most-read newspapers, The New Straits Times and The Star, controlled by parties in the ruling coalition, focused Wednesday on the government response to the U.S. legal case and for much of the day positioned other stories above their 1MDB coverage online.

Malaysian social media was polarized. Many Twitter and Facebook users latched on to references in the U.S. complaint to “Malaysian Official 1,” who allegedly received hundred of millions of dollars in funds siphoned from 1MDB. A person with direct knowledge of the investigation told the Journal that “Malaysian Official 1” is Mr. Najib.

Yet the litmus test for Mr. Najib’s hold on power remains the mood in his party. If he can keep the factions moderately happy, “then he will be in power a long time,” Mr. Oh said.

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Malaysia’s Real Problem? It’s Indonesia

By WILLIAM PESEK

Barron’s Asia

July 22, 2016

Malaysia’s complacency and drift under Najib Razak may see Indonesia zoom past it in the years ahead.

Najib Razak faces an international crisis. Not just with Loretta Lynch, the U.S. attorney-general, calling out official corruption in his Malaysia and seizing more than $1 billion in assets. And not just with investors frustrated with the complacency undermining his economy. The real problem for the scandal-plagued prime minister is Indonesia.

As Najib’s government circles the wagons to protect their man from international pressures, Indonesia’s newish leader, Joko Widodo, is welcoming them. It’s taken Widodo, who’s known as Jokowi, some time to find his reformist groove. But at the 641-day mark, there’s ample evidence that Jokowi is proving to be the anti-Najib in ways that could enrich Indonesians at Malaysians’ expense.

Admittedly, it seems odd to refer to Jokowi as “newish” one year and nine months into the job. But considering the fantastically-entrenched vested interests this political outsider is up against, and how close Indonesia was to failed statehood just 18 years ago, consolidating power and finding ones footing in Jakarta takes time. Jokowi is now rolling up his sleeves to address impediments to growth, and it’s a heartening sight.

It’s also quite a contrast with the disheartening state of play in Malaysia. Lynch didn’t mention Najib by name in her tantalizing Wednesday press conference (he’s a key U.S. ally in Asia). But it doesn’t take much imagination to connect the dots between Washington’s “Malaysian official 1” and the prime minister’s office (there’s already a #MalaysianOfficial1 hashtag on Twitter). By linking Najib to vast sums of money allegedly siphoned from state fund 1Malaysia Development Bhd., U.S. prosecutors ensured that Malaysia’s annus horribilis just got worse.

Najib created 1MDB in 2009 to boost his economy. Instead, the corruption and dysfunction surrounding it is a huge weight pulling down its global reputation. The Justice Department’s assertions of $3.4 billion of a fraud are plenty embarrassing: 1MDB funds lavished on Monets, Van Goghs, high-end real estate, jets and even Leonardo DiCaprio’s “Wolf of Wall Street” film about dodgy financiers trying to hide riches abroad. This is, as Justice officials points out, “a case where life imitated art.” One of the alleged offenders, by the way, is Najib’s stepson.

The controversy is a microcosm of why Malaysia’s potential is dimming as Indonesia’s luster increases. In 2009, when he rose to the office his father entered 39 years earlier, Najib pledged to raise Malaysia’s game in an increasingly competitive neighborhood. That meant replacing his father’s affirmative-action system benefiting the Malay majority at the expense of innovation and productivity. Yet Najib deepened the economic apartheid imperiling the outlook and the insularity that pervades Putrajaya.

The 12 months since the Wall Street Journal’s award-winning feat following the money – including $700 million in Najib’s personal accounts – has been a lost period for progress. The previous six years were, too, but the last year of circling wagons, demonizing the foreign media for uncovering official misdeeds and trying to play the victim mark a troubling expansion in Malaysia’s damage-control modus operandi.

In 1997, when financial contagion shook its markets and currency, then-Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad didn’t look in the mirror and strengthen fundamentals. He blamed George Soros and some shadowy cabal of Jews for trying to destabilizing his nation. Subsequent leaders used any number of conspiracy theories to justify draconian security laws. In 2014, Najib accused the global media of picking on his nation when Malaysia Airways lost a Boeing 777, proving with its botched response how unready his government was for primetime. And the year since the Journal’s 1MDB scoop has seen more finger-pointing in Putrajaya than soul searching.

That’s made for an awkward disconnect between Malaysia’s contention the scandal is over and widening investigations abroad. For Najib’s PR machine, it’s a game of whack-a-mole. Every time they smack down news of one probe in, say, Singapore, another pops up in Australia, France, Hong Kong, Switzerland, the U.K. or the U.S., where Lynch’s investigators are on the case. It’s shameful that the biggest 1MDB breakthroughs are coming from the outside, while Najib’s people claim to be shocked, shocked. They deny all wrongdoing and (of course) allege a geopolitical conspiracy to oust their man, somehow with a straight face.

The buzz in Jakarta couldn’t be more different. Unlike ultimate insider Najib, Jokowi is the first Indonesian leader who isn’t the scion of a political dynasty or from the military. His modest roots, community-organizer past and man-of-the-people persona drew comparisons to President Barack Obama. Early on, this youthful, interloper vibe had pundits buzzing about a regional “Jokowi effect.”

The excitement surrounding Jokowi’s rise to power, as Time wrote in April 2014 just before his victory, “is credited with ending voter apathy in elections being held in the world’s most populous Muslim nation.” The question is whether Jokowi’s rise might be emulated elsewhere in the region – in Malaysia, the Philippines or Thailand? – where connections and wealth are the main routes to power. In Malaysia’s case, that’s probably a no – not with the United Malays National Organisation that’s ruled the place since 1946 still in power and deflecting blame.

Malaysia’s complacency and drift may see to it that Indonesia zooms past it in the years ahead. Jokowi is accelerating efforts to privatize state-owned enterprises, so that they’ll no longer serve as “ATMs” for corrupt officials. His focus on improved infrastructure will increase economic efficiency, boost productivity and attract more foreign investment. A recent tax amnesty deal to encourage Indonesians to invest billions hidden overseas at home will fatten government coffers. Jakarta is working to support a nascent startup boom among its 250 million people. And Jokowi’s respected new national police chief, Tito Karnavian, suggests anti-corruption and anti-terrorism efforts are kicking into a higher gear.

It’s early days for Jokowi’s reform drive. And the determination of the vested interests standing in his way is fierce and menacing. But as Jokowi endeavors to drop the “kleptocracy” label Indonesia has worn for decades, Malaysia is earning its own. Perhaps that helps explain why the Jakarta Composite Index is up 14% this year, while the FTSE Bursa Malaysia KLCI Index is down 2%. In fact, Indonesia is the best-performing bourse in East Asia on a 12-month basis. Rupiah-denominated bonds are on a tear amid optimism Jokowi will strengthen the national balance sheet.

Markets don’t always provide insights or lessons to national leaders. But just as foreign journalists following the money are keeping the pressure on Najib’s Malaysia, the movement of capital toward Indonesia may indeed tell a bigger story.

                This entry was posted on Sunday, 24 July 2016, 4:58 am and is filed under
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The Crisis of Political Islam

By YAROSLAV TROFIMOV

Wall Street Journal

July 22, 2016

First Egypt and now Turkey show the perils of ideological religious parties (and strongman rule), but other Muslim countries are faring better with democracy

In 1999, a former mayor of Istanbul named Recep Tayyip Erdogan was imprisoned and banned from politics for life for reciting a poem. “Our minarets are our bayonets, our domes are our helmets, our mosques are our barracks,” the incriminating lines went. “My reference is Islam. If I am not able to speak of this, what is the use of living?”

The ban on Mr. Erdogan didn’t stick. Now Turkey’s president (and prime minister for 11 years before that), he is presiding over a nationwide purge of suspected enemies after the failure last week of a military coup against his government.

For decades, in much of the Middle East, Islamist politicians like Mr. Erdogan weren’t able to speak out — and, when they did, they frequently faced a prison cell or a hangman’s noose. From Algeria to Egypt to Turkey, the apparatus of the state repeatedly unleashed repression — of varying degrees of harshness — to marginalize political Islam, crushing democratic freedoms while offering the excuse of preserving secular values. The West, preferring the autocratic devils it knew over the Islamists it didn’t, often concurred.

In response, many of the Islamist movements that sprang up under the influence of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood — groups that include Mr. Erdogan’s party — have gradually embraced the language of pluralism and the idea of democratic politics and elections. Crucially, however, these modern Islamists have often viewed democracy not as a value in itself but merely as a tactic to bring about a “true” Islamic order. To them, the voting booth was simply the most feasible way to dismantle the postcolonial, secular systems that, in the eyes of their followers, had failed to bring justice or development to ordinary Muslims.

In 2005, Mr. Erdogan — then serving as Turkey’s prime minister and acclaimed for improving the country’s human-rights record and pushing forward its bid for membership in the European Union — let slip on a trip to Australia that he viewed democracy just as “a vehicle.”

In the subsequent decade, Mr. Erdogan has extinguished major centers of opposition in Turkey’s bureaucracy, media, military and judiciary. In the wake of the failed coup — itself a vivid confirmation that his suspicions weren’t unfounded — he has launched a crackdown on tens of thousands of potential opponents, including detaining nearly 9,000 people since the collapse of the plot. “All the checks and balances have now been eliminated,” said Soner Cagaptay, a Turkey expert at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

In Egypt, hopes for democracy were high in the wake of the 2011 demonstrations in Tahrir Square that helped to topple longtime autocrat Hosni Mubarak. But the country’s first democratically elected president, Mohammed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood, took just a few months after being elected in 2012 to start ominously consolidating his rule, granting himself immunity from judicial oversight. His power grab was cut short by a successful military coup the following year, which installed the country’s current strongman, Abdel Fattah Al Sisi. His regime has quickly proven more repressive even than Mr. Mubarak’s.

This cycle of conflict — between the entrenched “deep state,” dominated by a country’s military and security establishments, and Islamist parties eager to grab as much power as possible whenever elected due to their wholly legitimate fears that they won’t otherwise be allowed to govern — has been a major reason why democracy has failed to take root in the Middle East.

Tainted by their associations with the West or the autocratic regimes long in power, liberal and secular parties have struggled to emerge as a third option in much of the region. And democracy, after all, is a tough proposition when neither of the two major forces now shaping the Middle East’s politics — the old-guard autocrats and the Islamist movements — truly believes in it.

The democratic exception to this rule is Tunisia, the one Arab democracy to emerge from the Arab revolutions of 2011. It is the only country now rated as “free” by Freedom House, a U.S. organization that analyzes civil liberties and political rights, out of the 17 Muslim-majority nations in the Middle East and North Africa. That’s the worst record for any region.

“There is a lot to be done before democracy has a chance. Education, pluralistic ideas and consensus-building are in short supply in many of these countries,” said Hassan Hassan, a fellow at the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy in Washington, D.C.

This democracy problem is linked not so much with Islam, an ancient religion, as with political Islam — a modern ideology developed in 20th-century Egypt, in part, to redress the Middle East’s backwardness compared with the West. Its founding fathers in the Muslim Brotherhood met violent deaths — Hassan al-Banna was gunned down in 1949, Sayyid Qutb was hanged by the Egyptian government in 1966 — but their ideas took root throughout the Middle East after the repeated failures of autocratic regimes that preached the rival ideas of socialism and Arab nationalism. Offshoots of the Brotherhood now represent the dominant political movements from Morocco to Turkey to the Gaza Strip.

But the Muslim world is more than the Middle East. And the further one travels from the Middle East’s core, the less relevant this strain of political Islam tends to become. The world’s most populous Muslim country, Indonesia, has been a successful democracy since 1999. Conservative Islamist parties have remained at the margins of power, and local demands for more religious rule have been addressed through decentralization.

“Even though we are mostly Muslim, the way we practice Islam has very local characteristics. We in Indonesia like to live together in diversity; we are different, and this has created a challenge here for Islamist movements such as the Muslim Brotherhood,” explained Samsul Maarif, a scholar at the Center for Religious and Cross-Cultural Studies of Gadjah Mada University in Yogyakarta, on the Indonesia island of Java.

Islamist political parties have also consistently failed at the ballot box in Pakistan, the world’s second-most-populous Muslim country. That is one reason why Islamist radicals in Pakistan have embraced the strategy of terrorism instead. Even though Pakistan’s army still retains considerable influence over foreign and security affairs, democratic politics has consolidated there since the end of direct military rule in 2008. The 2013 election led to the country’s first handover of power between rival parties. Outside the Middle East, democracy has also worked, at least so far, in Muslim-majority nations as diverse as Senegal and Albania.

But political ideas tend to travel from the Muslim world’s core to its periphery, not the other way around. A decade ago, the West African nation of Mali was often held up as the freest Muslim democracy, a potential inspiration for democrats in war-torn Afghanistan and Iraq. Fast forward to 2012, and Mali’s democracy collapsed under the onslaught of Islamist radicals who had emulated the Taliban and al Qaeda.

Arguments about the role of religion — and divinely inspired morality — in public life are hardly unique to Muslim societies, of course. Established Western democracies have grappled with these issues too, and not always gracefully. During the lifetimes of many older Americans, after all, it has been a felony to sell alcohol or to engage in adultery or homosexual sex.

But Islam is a religion whose founder established a successful empire instead of dying on the cross. As a result, it offers a far more detailed prescription than Christianity of how government and society should be run. “The Quran is our constitution,” runs the Muslim Brotherhood’s historic slogan.

As such, politicians and voters who believe in the primacy of Islamic law inevitably find themselves in conflict with the principle of democracy whenever a majority favors a different path. This, after all, is why more radical groups, such as Islamic State, have rejected democracy outright as an infidel heresy.

After its 1979 revolution, Iran purported to reconcile this conundrum by establishing its “Islamic Republic.” Yet the Iranian system — in which the country’s Shiite clerical establishment retains supreme authority — has turned the country’s democratic institutions and elected officials into a sideshow whenever major decisions are made. Ultimate power rests with the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, not with parliament. As the Iranian constitution explicitly states, all laws and regulations “must be based on Islamic criteria” — which are up to the clerics.

The Iranian Revolution also led to a hardening sectarian divide across the region that has proven to be another obstacle to democratic politics. Sunni Saudi Arabia, whose legitimacy as the custodian of Islam’s holiest sites is hotly contested by the theocracy that runs Shiite Iran, has fought back by fomenting anti-Shiite sentiment and funding proxy battles with Iranian allies from Yemen to Syria. (Most Muslims are Sunnis.)

More recently, Gulf monarchies such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have backed Mr. Sisi’s coup in Egypt. The Gulf states, fearing for their own rule, were particularly hostile to the democratic experiment in Tunisia, the country where the Arab Spring began. Tunisia remains the only country where the heady initial hopes for freedom haven’t been dashed by a military takeover (as in Egypt), a bloody crackdown (as in Bahrain) or chaos and civil war (as in Syria, Yemen and Libya).

Tunisia became the region’s lone beacon of Arab democracy largely thanks to the wisdom shown by the local spinoff of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Ennahda Party. After the 2013 Egyptian coup, Ennahda, then essentially running Tunisia’s government, took an unusually pragmatic approach. It compromised on the role of Islam in society during sessions to draft the country’s new constitution and accepted an election that voted the party out.

“We may lose power, but Tunisia will win,” Ennahda’s leader Rached Ghannouchi recently told his party’s congress. Tunisia, he added, was able to avoid the carnage that followed the other Arab Spring revolutions by “adopting the principle of dialogue, acceptance of the other and avoidance of exclusion and revenge.”

That prescription has proven especially hard to apply in countries such as Syria and Iraq. With borders carved on the map by European colonialists, they have been run for much of their modern histories by dictatorial regimes that masked minority rule with a secular facade. Sunni-majority Syria has long been run by the Alawite-dominated Assad tyranny, and Shiite-majority Iraq was held under the boot of Saddam Hussein’s Sunni dictatorship.

After the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 introduced majority rule, the country quickly fell into Shiite sectarian dominance — especially under former Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, whose refusal to heed Sunni concerns pushed many of them into Islamic State’s embrace. In Syria, Alawites and other minorities continue backing President Bashar al-Assad despite his brutality, fearing that the advent of Sunni majority rule wouldn’t just disempower them but perhaps lead to their extermination.

In pivotal countries like Turkey and Egypt, both important U.S. partners, the political struggle has also become a zero-sum game. In this environment, the U.S. and its European allies have precious few instruments left to promote a democratic agenda, especially after the Obama administration worked to reduce its involvement in the Middle East and the antidemocratic powers of Russia and China tried to expand their influence.

In Egypt, Turkey and other Middle Eastern countries under stress, “leaders have been able to define societal struggles in existential terms,” said Steven Cook, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “What can a U.S. president or secretary of state do in those circumstances? Not much.”

Memories in the region are long, and few people have forgotten how, in the past, the West often sided with dictators such as Mr. Mubarak in Egypt, accepting the autocrats’ argument that the only alternative to their corrupt but secular rule was theocratic tyranny by bearded fanatics. It also didn’t help that, in 2013, Egypt’s secularists and liberals enthusiastically welcomed Mr. Sisi’s coup — only to be targeted themselves by the wave of repression that followed his takeover.

The West has often struggled to balance its ideals and its interests. The U.S. has offered only the mildest of criticisms of Mr. Sisi’s abuses, and in 1991, key Western countries, especially France, appeared to welcome the decision by Algeria’s rulers to abort a second round of elections that seemed sure to be won by an Islamist party. The Algerian coup sparked a civil war that claimed as many as 200,000 lives, convincing many previously peaceful Islamists that power can only be gained with bullets and bombs — and directly contributing to the rise of al Qaeda.

Turkey a week ago stood on the verge of following a similar route. “It’s hard to be optimistic about Turkey. But if the coup had succeeded, it would have offered further definitive proof that Islamists can’t take power in democratic elections or can’t stay in power through democratic elections,” said Shadi Hamid, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and the author of a new book, “Islamic Exceptionalism.” “That would have sent a dangerous message that ISIS and other extremist groups benefit from: that the only way to achieve anything is through brute force.”

                This entry was posted on Sunday, 24 July 2016, 4:42 am and is filed under
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What is most shocking is the total lack of shock of Najib and Cabinet Ministers  to the US DOJ’s horrendous 136-page legal suit under the US Kleptocracy Asset Recovery Initiative (KARI) exposing the host  of theft, misappropriation and embezzlement of tens of billions of ringgit of Malaysian public funds

In about a month’s time, we will be celebrating the 59th National Day and 53rd Malaysia Day anniversaries, but the last three days had been the most shameful, humiliating and mortifying period in the six decades of the nation’s history for all Malaysians, regardless of race, religion, region or political affiliation..

Never before had Malaysia been condemned and crucified in the global society as a thoroughly corrupt and decadent country, as when  the US Attorney-General Loretta E Lynch, told an international audience through Internet livestreaming of her press conference in United States that the American authorities are trying to recover for the Malaysian people billions of ringgit  stolen from them by corrupt officials meant “to grow the Malaysian economy and support the Malaysian people”.

Referring to the billions of ringgit that were “stolen, laundered through the American financial institutions and used to enrich a few officials and their associates”, Loretta said “Corrupt officials around the world should make no mistake that we will be relentless in our efforts to deny them the proceeds of their crimes.”

The 136-page US Department of Justice (DOJ) legal suit under the US Kleptocracy Asset Recovery Initiative is a “tale of infamy and horror”  about the multiple failures of democratic  good governance and key  national institutions in Malaysia – not just the Prime Minister, the Cabinet, Parliament but also institutions like the Police, the Attorney-General’s Chambers, the Bank Negara,  Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission and the Judiciary – that such mammoth and monstrous  global white-collar crimes could take place under their watch.

What I also find  most shocking in the past three days over  the DOJ legal suit to recover more than US$1 billion 1MDB-linked assets in the United States is the total lack of shock of the Prime Minister, Datuk Seri Najib Razak,  his Cabinet Ministers and government politicians   to the US DOJ’s horrendous 136-page legal suit under the US Kleptocracy Asset Recovery Initiative (KARI) exposing the litany of theft, misappropriation and embezzlement of tens of billions of ringgit of Malaysian public funds.

It would appear that Najib and his  Ministers were not at all shocked by the US DOJ legal suit, as if they had been expecting it and had choreographed their responses  – which is not surprising considering that the US DOJ and the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) initiated investigations under the Kleptocracy Asset Recovery Intiaitive 2010 as far back as September last year.

This may be why despite being mentioned 34 times in the DOJ legal suit as “Malaysian Official 1”, a high-level international pretence was adopted from the Prime Minister and the Attorney-General downwards that the Prime Minister, Datuk Seri Abdul Razak had not been named and Najib could adopt the stance that the DOJ suit was a civil one and the  legal process  in US must be allowed to be completed without any assumption being made until it is over.

This attempt at a cop-out by the Malaysian authorities is most weak,  tame and unacceptable , as the DOJ’s civil action is based on a host  of criminal conduct and activities which had stolen, misappropriated, embezzled and defrauded billions of ringgit of Malaysian public funds for the interests of a criminal and corrupt few.

For instance,  Paragraph 108 in the section on the diversion of  US$368 million from the 1MDB Joint Venture into the United States “to fund the luxurious lifestyles of LOW (Jho Low) and his associates”, enumerated how between October 2009 and October 2010, “misappropriated 1MDB funds were used for the following purposes:

(1)approximately US$12 million in wires to Caesars Palace, a Las Vegas casino;

(2) approximately US$13.4 million in wires to the Las Vegas Sands Corporation, the owner of the Venetian Las Vegas, another casino.

Paragraph 220 – 225 in the “F Section” of the portion on the misappropriation of US$1.367 billion from 1MDB in the AABAR-BVI Phase, related how AZIZ (Najib’s stepson, Riza Shahrir bin Abdul Aziz) in June/July 2012 “transferred at least US$41 million in funds received from Aabar-BVI to an account that was then used to pay gambling expenses for himself, Low and Tan (Eric Tan Kim Loong)” in Las Vegas.

Paragraph  223 (page 66) recorded that “On or about July 10, 2012, US$11 million was deposited into LOW’s account at the Venetian Casino (Las Vegas), and records show that LOW gambled there approximately seven days beginning on or about that date”.

Paragraph 225 on the gambling session on or about July 15, 2012, recorded: “Several individuals gambled with LOW on this occasion, using his account. These individuals included AZIZ; Red Granite Pictures founder McFarland; a lead actor in “The Wolf of Wall Street”, and former Chief Investment Officer of 1MDB.”

The  DOJ  civil suit under the US Kleptocracy Assets Recovery Initiative 2010  to seize over US$1 billion assets stolen and misappropriated from 1MDB list a whole catalogue of criminal activities leading to money-laundering, embezzlement and corruption of 1MDB funds which would keep a conscientious and high-powered Attorney-General’s Chambers, MACC and police team busy for years to bring the criminals to book – provided  the investigative and enforcement agencies concerned  are serious about upholding law and order and there is rule of law in Malaysia!

(Speech  at the DAP Jalong Branch Support, Sympathy and Solidarity (SSS) Lim Guan Eng Dinner in Sungai Siput on Saturday, July 23, 2016 at 10 pm)

                This entry was posted on Sunday, 24 July 2016, 1:35 pm and is filed under
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Thanks to Najib, Malaysia has overnight become a kleptocracy and one of the most globally corrupt nations!

Malaysia has scaled a new global height in the past four days.

Thanks to Prime Minister, Datuk Seri Najib Razak, Malaysia has achieved a new status, becoming overnight a kleptocracy and one of the most globally corrupt nations when the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) filed proceedings under the US Kleptocracy Assets Recovery Initiative 2010 (KARI)  to seize and confiscate over US$1 billion of assets in the United States which had been stolen, embezzled or  defrauded from the people of Malaysia through the national sovereign wealth fund, 1MDB.

“Kleptocracy” has been defined as rule by a thief or thieves.

When did Malaysians ever aspire the nation to become a “kleptocracy”?

To add insult to injury, the Minister for Agriculture and Agro-based Industries, Datuk Ahmad Shabery Cheek, shocked all Malaysians when he complacently said that the US DOJ legal suits under KARI to seize over US$1 billion of 1MDB-linked assets in the United States was a “normal matter” and nothing out of the ordinary when it comes to the Malaysian government.

This is indeed mind-boggling coming from a Minister who was formerly an university lecturer.

Shabery may only be forgiven for making such an outrageous statement if he had not read the DOJ’s 136-page legal suits for civil forfeiture against 1MDB-linked assets in the United States –  the unprecedented tales of infamy and hosts of horrors about massive and monstrous global theft, embezzlement, money-laundering and corruption of the 1MDB funds which  belonged to the people of Malaysia.

Although the Prime Minister, Datuk Seri Najib Razak himself had not been mentioned, the reference of “Malaysian Official 1” which appeared 34 times in the DOJ legal suit can only refer to him.

Never before in the 59-year history of the nation has the country suffered greater international infamy, shame and humiliation to be internationally pronounced as a “kleptocracy” and it is outrageous that a Malaysian Cabinet Minister could describe it as a “normal matter” and “nothing out of the ordinary”.

Shabery cannot be more wrong.

The US DOJ action to confiscate and recover more than US$1 billion 1MDB-linked assets on behalf of the people of Malaysia derived from “kleptocracy” is definitely not a “normal matter” for any state in the world, but a most unusual,  extraordinary  and humiliating event for three reasons:

Firstly, the US DOJ action to recover more than US$1 billion 1MDB-linked assets in the United States stolen, embezzled or defrauded from the people of Malaysia is not a “normal matter” but the largest single action ever brought under the KARI.

Secondly, such recovery action should be instituted by the government of Malaysia and not by another country;

Thirdly, the Malaysian government and people cannot allow Malaysia’s  image and reputation to be besmirched unchallenged by being equated as a  kleptocracy.

All Cabinet Ministers must read and digest the DOJ’s 136-page legal suit, put it as top item of the Cabinet agenda on Wednesday and announce to Malaysians what action it proposes to take to purge Malaysia of the shame and humiliation of being categorized as a kleptocracy.

(Speech at the Selangor DAP SSS (Support, Sympathy, Solidarity) LGE (Lim Guan Eng) Dinner in Shah Alam on Sunday, 24th July 2016 at 9 pm)

                This entry was posted on Monday, 25 July 2016, 11:15 am and is filed under
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