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KUALA LUMPUR – Former Goldman Sachs banker Tim Leissner has been ordered to forfeit US$43.7 million (RM643.2 million) in cash and all 3.3 million shares in energy drink company Celsius Holdings over his involvement in the 1Malaysia Development Bhd (1MDB) financial scandal.
US district judge Margo Brodie yesterday ordered Leissner to surrender the assets as part of his 2018 guilty plea to money laundering and bribery charges related to the sovereign wealth fund, Bloomberg reported today.
Once Goldman’s Southeast Asia chairman, Leissner was the highest-ranking of its bankers to plead guilty to the scheme to steal from 1MDB in return for more than US$60 million (RM253.3 million) in kickbacks.
Leissner had previously been a key witness in the trial of Roger Ng, his former subordinate in Goldman, subordinate and the former head of investment banking in Malaysia for the global services company.
The eight-week trial saw Leissner admitting on the stand to telling a raft of personal and professional lies in the plunder of 1MDB, for which Goldman arranged a trio of bond deals.
Ownership of Celsius, however, remains in disrepute after Ng in November last year filed a complaint in Manhattan court accusing Leissner of “repeatedly lying” to steal Ng’s investment in two companies – Celsius and artificial intelligence (AI) company Sentient Technologies.
The investments Leissner allegedly stole are US$1.25 million in the former, which are now worth more than US$130 million, as well as US$1 million that was meant for Ng to buy half of Leissner’s interest in the latter.
Judge Brodie reportedly said yesterday that the Celsius shares were being held at a JPMorgan Chase & Co account in the name of Leissner’s former wife, Kimora Lee Simmons, adding that anyone who asserts legal interest in the shares may file a petition with the court.
The forfeiture order comes the same day prosecutors issued a sentencing recommendation for Ng, in which they urged Brodie to slap Ng with a minimum 15-year prison sentence, following the guilty verdict he received in April last year for looting 1MDB funds.
The prosecutors, who are also seeking for a forfeiture order against Ng to give up the US$35.1 million (RM157.1 million) they said he earned in the scheme.
Ng’s crimes involved conspiring to violate US anti-bribery laws and launder money “merited a substantial amount of imprisonment”.
In his own sentencing memo filed last week, Ng asked the judge to spare him from prison – claiming that the six months he spent in a Malaysian prison before being extradited to the US in 2019 and his four years of house arrest since then was “punishment enough”.
He added that he still faces prosecution in Malaysia for the 1MDB fraud.
Disagreeing with his filing, prosecutor Alixandra Smith said the pending Malaysian criminal charges “expeditiously should not take precedence over the need for the defendant to be appropriately sentenced in the US”.
Brodie is scheduled to sentence Ng on March 9. – The Vibes, March 4, 2023
