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KUALA LUMPUR – It was a gamble for former Goldman Sachs banker Roger Ng when he was persuaded to stand trial in the United States rather than in Malaysia for his involvement in the 1Malaysia Development Bhd (1MDB) financial scandal.
This decision also took a toll on his family left behind in Malaysia.
After the Brooklyn federal court found him guilty, defence lawyer Marc Agnifilo said he was the one who talked his client into facing a US court.
“I told him you’d be far better off in the United States, where we have a real system and a real trial. I’ve rethought that decision ten thousand times,” he was quoted as saying by Bloomberg.
This decision led Ng to live in New York free on bond for about three years. He last saw his daughter when she was six years old and Malaysia barred his wife Lim Hwee Bin from leaving.
1MDB “is a personal disaster in the life of that family”, said Agnifilo.
Lim was only in New York to testify on Ng’s behalf after she obtained a “safe passage” letter that the US government will not prosecute her.
The lawyer said the team will challenge the conviction while coordinating with Ng’s lawyers in Malaysia on their next move.
Yesterday, the Justice Department described Ng’s conviction as a victory not only for the rule of law, but also for the people of Malaysia the fund was supposed to help.
“The defendant and his cronies saw 1MDB not as an entity to do good for the people of Malaysia, but as a piggy bank to enrich themselves with piles of money syphoned off from the fund.”
Ng, 49, was convicted of all three counts in the case, including conspiring to violate US anti-bribery laws and conspiring to launder money.
He faces as many as 30 years in prison.
The verdict is the result of an eight-week federal trial in Brooklyn, New York, that featured startling confessions from Tim Leissner, Ng’s boss at the time.
Leissner, who pleaded guilty and was the key witness against Ng, admitted 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.
Once Goldman’s Southeast Asia chairman, Leissner was the highest-ranking Goldman banker to plead guilty to the scheme to steal from 1MDB in return for more than US$60 million (RM253.3 million) in kickbacks.
Ng was the firm’s former head of investment banking in Malaysia. His trial revealed new details of the scheme, in which businessman-turned-fugitive Low Taek Jho hustled the stolen billions out of 1MDB immediately after each bond deal Goldman completed for the fund, according to testimony from prosecution witnesses.
Central to the government’s case was an FBI chart showing that Leissner sent US$35 million of the booty to a shell company controlled by Ng’s wife. The FBI said she later spent US$300,000 on diamond jewellery and US$20,000 on a gold hourglass.
Leissner, who pleaded guilty in 2018, spent 10 days on the witness stand, more than five of them under withering cross-examination by Agnifilo, who called him a “cunning liar”.
In addition to his own kickbacks, Leissner testified, he paid Ng more than US$35 million, which prosecutors said was laundered through a series of offshore entities. – The Vibes, April 10, 2022
