Perhaps few will have been surprised to hear the recent news that  Goldman Sachs’ fall guy,  Tim Leissner, is queuing up (amongst several thousand other hopefuls) to receive a pardon from President Trump having been painstakingly brought to justice over a decade of investigation and litigation over the record 1MDB theft of billions from the Malaysian public.

He is merely taking a leaf out of the book from the guy at the top, after all, prime minister Najib Razak.  Also like Najib, in doing so he has demonstrated his continuing access to large sums of money to expend on lawyers to perform endless applications for delay and other special favours (of which more later), despite having supposedly surrendered the proceeds of his crimes.

Given that the US system of justice appears to have suddenly become as nakedly open to accusations of ‘undue influence’ as the “Third World sh**hole countries” the current US leader so openly denigrates, that pot of money could prove pivotal.

Trump immediately pardoned the wealthy Republican fundraiser, Elliot Broidy, back in 2020 for his greedy attempts to sabotage US investigations into the scandal (assisting a Chinese spy ring in the process), whereas the more modest player on his team, Nancy Lum Davis (of Asian background) served the sentence.  Likewise, it is so far only the Malaysian Goldman Sachs banker, Roger Ng, who has seen the inside of a cell.

However, the ex-banker is not putting all his eggs in that one basket. There are other pleas which have delayed and sought to mitigate his sentence as he, like Najib, seeks the kid glove treatment and believes he deserves it.

Leissner has gained sympathy, certainly from the DOJ, for turning star witness in the case and testifying against Ng.  However, given that Ng is the only criminal prosecution to have resulted from the case so far and the enormous fines and civil asset seizures largely resulted from plain old anti-money laundering investigation work, it is arguable that Leissner’s main contribution was to add colour to the narrative.

The fact of what Jho Low, Najib and Goldman Sachs and their co-conspirators did is there in the black and white printouts from the banking transactions. It was published by the DOJ in their original civil asset seizure filings long before Leissner was picked up.

Nonetheless, it seems that the extremely light sentence that was finally meted out to the banker at the end of last year, after five years of delays and postponements, is not sufficient reward in his view. While Leissner is trying to get off the hook entirely he has meanwhile also sought to delay the enforcement of his sentence – now for the third time, until February 16th.

Moreover, he has started lobbying to change the location of his incarceration from a low security category ‘facility’ on the East Coast of the United States, where he was brought to justice, to one in Sunny Southern California. This happens to be where his now divorced family lives in a grand residence that he secured with stolen 1MDB money. His ex-wife (model Kimora Lee Simmonds) apparently shows no intention of surrendering it.

And this brings us to another matter relating to unreturned Malaysian money. Leissner and his former family are still squabbling with the DOJ as to who should benefit from the hundreds of millions of dollars worth of Celsius shares (a Chinese soft drinks company) that Leissener also bought into using 1MDB stolen funds.

The shares have leapt in value over the period from being worth just tens of millions to over $400 million. That might have looked like a bit of silver lining for Malaysia, had they been hopeful of seeing the well-informed investment returned.  However, it has emerged that Leissner’s Ex reckons the money is owed to her; not only that, her own previous Ex (an American ‘Hip Hop artist’)  thinks some should also go to him!

The DOJ looks set to carve a deal that also gives the department, which has already exacted massive fines from Goldman Sachs (admittedly helped by Leissner’s evidence of the banks appalling failure to acknowledge Red Flag behaviour in the pursuit of profit) a nice slice of the money.  Nothing to Malaysia so far mooted.

It further appears from the statements produced in court that some $170 million is still missing from the overall equation following the sale of Leissner’s 1MDB funded company Midas Commodities Delaware on the day after the 2018 election: money which evidence suggests Leissner has waiting for him in a Central European offshore haven, once he has finished his prison-based Masters Degree course (the one he claims to have already earned was exposed by Sarawak Report as a bogus qualification).

The story of 1MDB has thus gradually evolved from a promising narrative of US enforcement bringing white-collar criminals to rightful justice to a more tawdry looking tale of bargaining, double standards, failures of judicial oversight and departmental greed.

Meanwhile, the most salient admissions of all in Mr Leissner’s testimony were quietly put to one side by the Department of Justice, once Goldman Sachs had agreed to pay a bonus inspiring record fine of $2.9 billion to the US authorities.

The claim by their star witness, made in court, which the DOJ simply failed to probe further was this:

“During the course of the conspiracy, I conspired with other employees and agents of Goldman Sachs very much in line of its culture of Goldman Sachs to conceal facts from certain compliance and legal employees of Goldman Sachs, including the fact that Jho Low, who is identified as Co-Conspirator Number 1 in the information, was acting as a intermediary for on behalf of Goldman Sachs, 1MDB, and Malaysian and Abu Dhabi officials”

No-one further up the ladder at Goldman Sachs or any colleague of Leissner and Ng has ever been pursued over this admitted conspiracy, of which Leissner plainly has evidence. Therefore, whilst Malaysian corruption has been taken very seriously (and rightly so) the appetite to tackle US and other versions of the same disease appears to have subsequently and very publicly collapsed.