19 Apr 2024, 11:58 Kuching
19 Apr 2024, 04:58 London
Deposits into personal accounts of Malaysia’s prime minister totaled more than $1 billion—hundreds of millions more than previously identified—and global investigators believe much of it originated with a Malaysian state fund, people familiar with the matter say…
Mr. Najib has denied wrongdoing or taking any money for personal gain.
His office declined to comment on the assertion the money deposited in his accounts exceeded $1 billion. Most money beyond the previously identified $681 million arrived in 2011 and 2012, said two people familiar with flows into his accounts and a person familiar with one overseas probe. The $681 million arrived in 2013.
Mr. Najib’s office also wouldn’t comment on overseas investigators’ belief that the $681 million originated with 1MDB…..
1MDB said it stood by its financial reports, which show payments to Aabar [Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund].
The fund’s website and financial filings said it paid $1.4 billion to Aabar—without specifying a full name—as a cash deposit in 2012. The fund also paid nearly $1 billion in 2014 to extinguish options given to IPIC for guaranteeing bonds, according to a draft report by Malaysia’s auditor general.
IPIC has denied to 1MDB that either IPIC or Aabar ever received this nearly $2.4 billion, said people familiar with the matter.
The whole amount moved to the similarly named British Virgin Islands firm, according to the person familiar with flows into Mr. Najib’s accounts… From there, $681 million moved indirectly to another British Virgin Islands firm, this one called Tanore Finance Corp., investigators believe.
And they believe this money then moved on to Mr. Najib’s account—transferred out of an account that Tanore held in Singapore with a Swiss private bank called Falcon Bank.
The investigators believe that sometime later, most of the $681 million was sent back into the web of offshore entities through which it had arrived.
The Wall Street Journal now says it has independently corroborated the information published by Sarawak Report last year, which was that the money in the PM’s KL accounts exceeded a billion dollars, before some US$620 million was sent back abroad after GE13.
They also now validate that there were two major sets of payments into Najib’s AmBank account before the Tanore Finance Corporation payment in 2013.
These were a payment of US$170 million in 2011, according to SR’s sources, which was sent by a company called Blackstone Real Estate Investment Limited (BVI), belonging to Najib’s controversial business crony Jho Low, and a later payment in 2012 of over US$200 million.
SR has also revealed that in 2012 this Blackstone BVI company paid almost half a billion dollars to the Chairman of the Abu Dhabi fund Khadem Al Qubaisi, through the Luxembourg Edmund de Rothschild bank.
WSJ has now further confirmed that US$2.4 billion flowed from 1MDB’s 2012 ‘power purchase’ bond issues as a supposed payment to a BVI company named Aabar Investments PJS Ltd, which has an almost identical name to a genuine subsidiary of the Aabar fund, but was in fact privately opened by the now sacked Qubaisi and his deputy Mohamed al Husseiny.
It was that money which wended its way into Najib’s accounts says the WSJ, which says there is no evidence any of the cash came from Saudi.
Meanwhile, SR has already exposed the Fake Sheikh, who acted as the so-called Saudi front for the money. This character, who signed letters guaranteeing the money to AmBank, does not exist. He later has morphed into another front, Prince Turki bin Abdullah, a son of the former King. But, Turki has been paid at least US$77 million by 1MDB, not the other way around, for his part in the earlier PetroSaudi heist.
The Saudi is just a reluctant stooge for a desperate PM, who ought to resign before his people take to the streets.
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