There was plenty of coverage over the past week after Goldman Sachs’ former head of Southeast Asia, Tim Leissner, was finally sentenced in  New York Courtroom (a full ten years after Sarawak Report first exposed his crimes).

The man who was pivotal to the conspiracy that schemed to steal over $5 billion dollars from Malaysia’s public purse was sentenced to a thundering ….. 2 years in jail.

This is of course eight years less than his Malaysian junior colleague Roger Ng received, whom Leissner shopped to the authorities in return for his own deal to turn witness for the Department of Justice.

It is, in fact, the same length of time that a magistrate saw fit to sentence the author of this website (which exposed the entire scandal) for citing that the Terengganu Sultan’s wife, instead of the Sultan’s sister, had introduced him to Jho Low.

That unplanned error was immediately acknowledged and corrected, whereas Tim Leissner was to continue to assist Jho Low and his boss, Prime Minister Najib Razak, in continuing to steal and launder money, and to deny and cover up the crimes, for a further three years after Sarawak Report’s initial exposes.

Therefore, whilst it has been reported in some quarters that Leissner has “paid the price” for his crimes, others are questioning whether in fact the shadowy German/American banker hasn’t pulled off a stunning coup.  As one financial expert who has followed the case told Sarawak Report last week:

“He will get to be in some cushy open prison for a few months before he is let out early for good behaviour.  Then he will be parachuted back to Germany where he can live like a king for the rest of his days off the huge stash of money the DOJ have turned a blind eye to, which was stolen from Malaysia”.

So, what stash are such folk referring to and why do so many people believe that Tim Leissner has, just like the mega-bank that once employed him, pulled off such a major heist against Malaysia at minimal cost to himself?

Key Penitent Crucial to DOJ Case?

It is clear that the US Department of Justice (DOJ) has a remaining case to pursue over 1MDB and that it regards Leissner as a key witness for that case.  Federal prosecutors stated as much to the California court last month.

Yet, even this objective could surely not justify the level of fulsome praise the department lavished on Leissner as it argued for a lesser sentence from the judge?

The DOJ’s deposition supporting leniency in return for his having acted as a cooperating witness praising Leissner for crucial and invaluable assistance he provided gave the impression that he was pivotal in flushing out the thefts from 1MDB.  Yet, the facts speak otherwise.

The banker was arrested only in June 2018 a month after Najib lost the election in Malaysia and long after Sarawak Report and others exposed 1MDB. Indeed, the DOJ had issued its first asset seizure a full two years before. Throughout the intervening period, as investigators built their case, Leissner had continued to participate in the conspiracy as a key advisor to Jho Low and Najib.

Following his arrest as he landed back in the United States (following a flash tour of the discreet banking centres of Lichtenstein and Luxembourg for reasons as yet undisclosed) the banker did almost immediately agree to provide full cooperation (after an initial day or so of denials and hesitations).

His information was doubtless extremely useful in terms of evidence, given Leissner (in defiance of Jho Low’s instructions) had kept all the texts and emails that had flowed between himself and his fellow conspirators.

This proved a trove of added evidence that investigators used, for example, to nail Leissner’s colleague and to confront the bank itself over the shocking criminality of its operations.

The US authorities were thus able to exact record fines from Goldman Sachs of $2.9 billion in a deferred prosecution settlement in 2020 and to draw up compelling cases against Roger Ng and a ring of Jho Low’s and Leissner’s fellow conspirators.

However, by the time of his arrest, the 1MDB case itself had been largely wrapped up, the criminal actors had been identified and the missing money extensively traced with well over a billion dollars worth of assets seized. Najib would soon be arrested in Malaysia itself.

This had all been achieved not thanks to Mr Leissner but thanks to the whistleblowing evidence provided by sources speaking to Sarawak Report, most notably the Swiss businessman Xavier Justo who had been a former director of PetroSaudi, the bogus joint venture partner used as an original front to steal from 1MDB.

The Department of Justice had lodged its first criminal complaints and assets seizures worth over $1.7 billion in mid-2016 with a stunning court filing that laid out in granular detail how monies had been stolen from 1MDB and where the money had gone.  Prosecutors in Switzerland and Singapore acted likewise freezing hundreds of millions more.  None of this was thanks to the slightest cooperation from Leissner.

By that juncture Najib, working together with the circle of conspirators, had long since orchestrated Justo’s arrest on trumped up charges in Thailand (in June 2015) and had him thrown into jail in Bangkok as part of their elaborate cover-up scheme to discredit his evidence and the reporting on the crime by Sarawak Report.

And, whilst Justo continued to languish in the Bangkok jail Leissner continued to assist Jho Low in his attempts to move money and even to gain a bank account at Goldman Sachs right up until the day Najib lost the election. Indeed, he was later to confess that he had calculated that for as long as Najib was in office the prime minister would be able to protect the 1MDB conspirators and deal with critics, just as Justo had been dealt with.

He had been sacked for this collaboration, in violation of the bank’s policy to reject Jho Low as a client, a few short weeks before the headline news gathering DOJ report.

These are the reasons why there are several who are of the view, including senior Malaysian political figures,  that Leissner is far less deserving of leniency than the DOJ and now the US court have argued. He showed no penitence, made no confessions and offered no help until the day there was no way out.

Worse, there is strong evidence that Leissner’s deal means that once he has served his short period of ‘study time’ in a soft open prison (nothing like the Bangkok jail that Xavier Justo suffered in for 18 months whilst Leissner stood aside and said nothing) the former Goldman man will walk out a very wealthy man, thanks to stolen Malaysian money still secreted from 1MDB.

The Leissner Record

That conclusion owes to the clear record that now exists of Leissners’s actions.  It is a record that shows the banker was engaged in the plot from the very inception of the scheme to create and then steal from the Malaysian sovereign fund in 2008, right up to the day Najib tried to escape to the airport after losing the May 2018 election.

Indeed, without the savvy and connections of the international banker, who was ambitiously seeking to gain Goldman Sachs its foothold and licenses in Malaysia, it seems highly improbable that the rookie 26 year old Jho Low and his patrician political boss could have ever pulled off the complexities of raising the multi-billion dollar bonds that fuelled 1MDB’s orgies of theft in the first place.

It is documented that at the very start of the precursor Terengganu sovereign fund project (TIA), initiated by Jho and Najib back in 2008, Tim Leissner was drafted in in the name of Goldman Sachs to advise the project.

Goldman Sachs had just opened business in Malaysia and Leissner had been introduced to Jho Low by Roger Ng.  The bank did not yet have a licence to raise bonds in the local market.  However, having hit it off with Najib and Jho Low, Leissner has admitted they were able to frame a vetting process designed to allow Goldman to win the tender to advise on raising a RM5 billion bond for the Terengganu fund.

The business, Leissner told the Roger Ng trial in New York, was worth a hundred million dollars to the bank. The 2008 TIA bond was raised through the local AmBank and, in an original act of gross theft, Jho Low was able through a series of corruptly discounted early placements to skim off over $140 million from the process into his own companies.

As Malaysians now well know, the remaining billion dollars from the TIA bond money was then appropriated into a hastily constructed federal development fund, namely 1MDB, and immediately ‘invested’ into a ‘joint venture’ with the bogus oil company PetroSaudi, which promptly passed $700 million to Jho Low and kept $300 million for itself.

Leissner’s own association with the ‘PetroSaudi boys’ has been well documented by, for example, the book about Jho Low, Billion Dollar Whale.

Just one month after the deal went through, in November 2010,  Jho Low then brought Najib to New York where Tim Leissner introduced the Malaysian prime minister/ finance minister to his own big boss, Lloyd Blankfein, the CEO of Goldman Sachs.  By the following month Goldman Sachs had smoothly obtained its own licences to raise bonds directly in Malaysia.

Again, as most Malaysians now well know, once that was achieved Goldman Sachs stepped to the forefront of an orgy of further borrowing by 1MDB, directly underwriting three mega-bond issues in short succession through 2012-13.

The bonds raised $6.5 billion, much of which was stolen with the deliberate connivance of the two Goldman Sachs bankers who personally raked off tens of millions of dollars for themselves and enabled the theft of hundreds of millions more by Najib, Jho Low and others – all the while gaining plaudits for raising a record $600 million in fees for their bank.

The DOJ itself is on the record saying also that the team at Goldman Sachs continued to advise Jho Low during the course of 2014 when 1MDB raised yet another series of humungous loans this time from a Deutsche Bank led syndicate in order to allegedly buy out options (actually to pay off debts and fund more thefts) in advance of a planned public stock market offering that Leissner had proposed as a way to ‘float’ 1MDB out of the financial troubles caused by all these thefts (by 2015 1MDB was $11 billion in debt).

Leissner did not stop all this criminal collaboration and cover-up after being ‘let go’ by Goldman in March 2016.  To the contrary, working as a freelance he became involved in Jho Low’s later money laundering as the Malaysian conspirators sought to cover up 1MDB debts by skimming billions off over inflated rail and pipeline contracts in the course of 2017 and passing them through the accounts of politically connected allies in Kuwait.

This new phase of criminality was also exposed and has been well documented by Sarawak Report. However Leissner’s personal role has been less reported. Yet, the evidence shows that the by now ex-Goldman banker was still using his connections and expertise to assist Jho Low in transporting the money through Kuwait.

Firstly, there was an attempt to buy the offshore Century Bank in Mauritius, which the authorities stopped.  One of Leissner’s own companies was connected to that aborted deal.

Later, Jho Low transferred a further €145 million of the stolen Malaysian money through the Kuwaiti network to another Leissner off-shore company account, of which $39 million was used to pay pressing 1MDB debts – yet another attempt at cover-up.

The stock market did not buy the ruse that 1MDB was solvent and nor did the Malaysian people. The debt repayment manoeuvre, which took place just before the election, did nothing to restore credibility to Najib and the rest is history.

Save for the small question as to what has happened to the remainder of that €145 million on record as having been transferred from Kuwait to Leissner’s company Midas Commodities?  Leissner sold the company the very day of the election that Najib lost. He then flew to Europe, including Luxembourg and Lichtenstein, before returning to his subsequent arrest.

On his arrival back in the United States he was picked up at the airport and turned himself into the DOJ’s favourite cooperating witness. He surrendered shares to the US government which are now worth in excess of $300 million, all purchased with cash stolen from 1MDB, money which remains in the US courts.

However, Leissner had also bought a Beverley Hills mansion that remains un-confiscated.  Moreover, till this day, neither the Department of Justice nor Malaysia appear to have probed the balance of the stolen Malaysian money – over $100 million –  that passed to Leissner’s Midas Commodities in 2017 and, according to his own court testimony, was never utilised.

Najib repeatedly justified 1MDB’s financial activities by referring to the stellar reputation of the international bank advising his fund, Goldman Sachs.  It was that reputation and the underwriting by the bank that enabled the fund to raise billions in bonds.

Could the man behind that all that leverage and know how, whom we now know acted as a key conspirator in the scheme to thieve billions from Malaysia, therefore be looking forward to a not so distant future where he can retire to a Beverley Hills Mansion with $100 million to play with?

If so, forget the fugitive Jho Low. The Shadow Mastermind of 1MDB, the US banker from Germany, has played out a criminal masterplan in plain sight and the DOJ have let him do it.