Wednesday, January 27, 2016

Malaysia Prime Minister Has $680 Million Cash in His Bank Account; Top Goldman Bankster Bolts the Country

Goldman bankster and wife, friends of the Prime Minister


This should get pretty interesting.

WSJ reports (Pay attention to 1MDB as a source of the funds). My bold:
Malaysia’s anticorruption agency said Wednesday it wants to review the decision of the country’s top prosecutor to drop investigations into how nearly $700 million was transferred to Prime Minister Najib Razak’s private bank account.

Mr. Najib and other government officials said the day before that a time had come to draw a line under the controversy after Attorney General Mohamed Apandi Ali ruled the 2013 transfer a day earlier as a legal “personal donation” from Saudi Arabia’s royal family and cleared the prime minister of any wrongdoing...

A Saudi government official, while declining to comment on the prosecutor’s statement, said Tuesday that the Saudi ministries of foreign affairs and finance had no information about a donation to Mr. Najib and that a royal donation to the personal bank account of a foreign leader would be unprecedented. Representatives of the royal family couldn’t be reached for comment.

The Wall Street Journal reported in July that an earlier Malaysian government investigation found that the $700 million had entered Mr. Najib’s accounts via banks, companies and entities linked to 1MDB, which Mr. Najib set up in 2009 to encourage more economic development in the country. 
Now, here is this report from FT. My bold.:

Goldman banker takes ‘personal leave’
Tim Leissner, the driving force behind high-profile deals between Goldman Sachs and Malaysia’s troubled state investment fund, has taken “personal leave” from Goldman and moved from Singapore to Los Angeles.
His departure comes as Najib Razak, Malaysia’s prime minister, fights to extricate himself from a donations scandal alleged to be linked to the investment fund, known as 1MDB.
Mr Leissner was most recently Goldman’s Southeast Asia chairman, and spent more than a decade of his 18 years with the bank closely involved in the region. His close relationships with top officials in Kuala Lumpur produced what one executive described as a “golden period” for the bank.
He became president of Goldman’s Singapore operations in 2006, having run its investment banking operation in the country since 2002. In 2014 the bank named him chairman of Southeast Asia as part of efforts to bolster Goldman’s presence in the region.
Goldman declined to comment on Mr Leissner’s move or his leave...

Goldman’s relationships in Malaysia first came to the fore in 2013 when the bank collected a $300m fee on a $3bn bond arranged for 1MDB...Usually bond fees are a fraction of that amount. ..
Mr Leissner was a key player in the bank’s relationships with power brokers in Kuala Lumpur, including Mr Najib , who chairs 1MDB’s advisory board....Mr Leissner’s wife has tweeted pictures of herself with Mr Najib’s wife, Rosmah, whom she described as “my friend”.
 -RW

2 comments:

  1. Those funds had better be ringfenced as they seem to belong to the state and not the personal bank account of some politician.

    At the very least its better to waste the money on each Malaysian living below the breadline or facing difficulties in their persoal and professional lives due to the malfeasance of politics and justice in the country and the wider international community.



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