Obama orderd a federal grand jury Investigation on the tainted Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak
Deputy Prime Minister Ahmad Zahid Hamidi said Save UMNO not Najib Save Malaysia set aside our ideological and political differences
‘Damage has already been done to his almost non-existent reputation.’
under the scrutiny of American investigators a parade of inquiries at home and abroad into a sovereign wealth fund that he oversees,The inquiry, being run by a unit of the Justice Department that investigates international corruption, is focused on properties in the United States that were purchased in recent years by shell companies that belong to the prime minister’s stepson as well as other real estate connected to a close family friend A federal grand jury is examining allegations of corruption involving the Prime Minister, Najib Razak, and people close to him,
Critic of Malaysia's PM arrested, prevented from traveling to New York:
Former Malaysian prime minister Mahathir Mohamad has raised the possibility of current Prime Minister Najib Razak being arrested if he leaves the country, reported the Malaysian Insider.
He said ongoing investigations by other countries into allegations of money-laundering at troubled Malaysian state fund 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB) could open the Premier to arrest if he travels abroad.
"Those countries - Switzerland, Britain, America - if they find Najib doing any money laundering (activities) they can ask Interpol to arrest him if he goes overseas," the Malay Mail Online quoted him as saying.
"So he has to remain here, like how he withdrew the passports of some people and barred them from going overseas," Tun Mahathir said on Friday afternoon during a meeting with a non-governmental organisation called Kumpulan Melayu Berani Bersatu in Kuala Lumpur, as quoted by the Malaysian Insider.
Citing the example of Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir, who is wanted by the International Criminal Court to be tried on various charges including those linked to the genocide in Darfur, Tun Mahathir said if a crime has some connection to a foriegn country, that country had the right to investigate and prosecute the crime, the Malaysian Insider reported.
He added that local Malaysian laws could be applied only if the alleged crimes were committed in Malaysia.
The Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday that the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has launched an investigation into the 1MDB money-laundering allegations.
The Malaysian Prime Minister is embroiled in a financial scandal involving US$700 million (S$973 million) deposited into his personal bank accounts that he says is political donations from the Middle East.
As chief adviser of 1MDB, he is also criticised for mismanagement at the fund.
according the Deputy Prime Minister Datuk Seri Dr Ahmad with knowledge of the The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has launched an investigation into allegations of money-laundering at troubled Malaysian state fund 1MDB investigation.
also read thisRiza Aziz Najib stepson benefited
A US federal grand jury a wide-ranging investigation on the tainted Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak damaged reputation its bottom line.Grand juries decide whether there is probable cause to indict Najib for a crime investigating allegations of corruption involving Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak and people close to him over property purchases in the United States and a US$681 million (S$964 million) payment made to what is believed to be Najib's personal bank account.
It has been a roller-coaster month which Malaysians had not have the misfortune to experience before.
It began with the explosive Wall Street Journal (WSJ) report alleging that government investigators had discovered US$700 million (RM2.6 billion) deposited into Prime Minister, Datuk Seri Najib Razak’s personal bank accounts in AmBank in March 2013 just before the 13th General Election, which Najib had not denied but repeatedly declared he had never taken funds for personal gain, to a major and ongoing purge and crackdown of key institutions started with the sacking of the Deputy Prime Minister and the Attorney-General and followed by the overawing and intimidation of the Cabinet, Parliament, the Press and the multi-agency Special Task Force investigating 1MDB comprising Bank Negara Malaysia (BNM), Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission (MACC), Royal Malaysian Police and the Attorney-General’s Chambers (AGC).
In one month, the country went from the “high” of the Prime Minister assuring the nation that no stone would be left unturned to get to the bottom not only of the RM42 billion 1MDB scandal but the WSJ report of RM2.6 billion deposited into the Prime Minister’s personal bank accounts, (and Najib was so confident that he publicly declared that all investigations will clear him), to the “low” of the “hunters being hunted”, allegations that the sacked Attorney-General Tan Sri Gani Patail was in the final stage of drafting corruption charges against Najib himself, and the Special Task Force investigating 1MDB virtually accused of being involved in an international conspiracy to topple the elected Prime Minister of Malaysia.
How does one separate fact from fiction, truth from lies.
we have no weapons of mass destruction, hidden or otherwise.
(AG) Mohamed Apandi and C4IGP.
Now can take on the job of being a caddy for Obama and earn 5 dollars an hour x 5 hrs = USD25 for 18 holes.
And yet Najib appears to be relaxed as if nothing untoward is happening
This society pest is a great shame to his father, our late Tun Razak. He’s beyond hope & corrupted to the core.?
Transparency International Malaysia (TI-M) hit the nail on the head when on Thursday (30th July) its president Akhbar Satar pronounced the 1MDB probes “dead” – whether the multi-agency Special Task Force, the Public Accounts Committee or even by the Auditor-General.
This sombre prediction was driven home by the trio of arrests, namely a MACC deputy public prosecutor Ahmad Sazilee Abdul Khairi who had been handling the 1MDB probe, MACC’s former advisory board member Tan Sri Rashpal Singh and the Attorney-General’s Chambers finance and anti-money laundering secretariat member Jessica Gurmeet Kaur.
Where else in the world apart from a failed state in a third-world country does investigators into major corruption scandal commissioned by the Prime Minister himself end up being arrested and being accused of trying to topple the elected Prime Minister by committing the new-fangled offence of “activities detrimental to parliamentary democracy”?
Where else in the world apart from a failed state in a third-world country does the Police closes its eyes to the existence of a website spinning the theory of an international conspiracy to topple the elected Prime Minister over the 1MDB scandal and demanding the most dire actions to be taken agains the alleged “conspirators”, even listing the names of 13 such conspirators, two of whom had been nabbed by the police?
The five so-called independent oversight panels of the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission has issued a statement warning that there should be no interference or pressure on the MACC or the special task force investigating 1MDB.
This interference and pressure have happened. What heroic action is forthcoming from the five oversight MACC panels to protect the integrity and professionalism of the MACC?
Former Prime Minister, Tun Abdullah Ahmad Badawi has urged the newly-appointed Cabinet to “act fast” in solving the 1MDB issue as the eyes of the public are on them following the Cabinet reshuffle.
The pronouncements of the reshuffled Cabinet, in particular the 1MDB “trio” of Ministers who are clearly assigned the task to launch an offensive on the 1MBD issue, does not inspire confidence that the reshuffled Najib government would “act fast” to resolve the 1MDB issue, but would only “act fast” to launch a purge and crackdown of 1MDB critics, whether in UMNO, Parliament or country.
The dilemma and challenge facing all Malaysians, whether in UMNO or outside, is the stark and brutal one: Save Najib, Save UMNO or Save Malaysia?
Pressure in Malaysia on Mr. Najib intensified on Monday as two separate courts dealt him legal setbacks. And the Head of the country’s central bank, which is investigating transactions involving the sovereign wealth fund, said it had submitted its findings to the Malaysian Attorney-General.
the US prosecutors plan to unvei l“Right now, we know that the public wants answers to these questions, and they deserve to get the answers,” said the head banker, Zeti Akhtar Aziz,The Justice Department investigation to determine if any federal laws were broken. It was opened partly in response to an examination by The New York Times of condominiums at the Time Warner Center in Manhattan whose ownership is hidden behind shell companies, according to the people with knowledge of the case.
In one article, The Times documented more than $150 million in luxury residential properties connected either to Mr. Najib’s stepson, Riza Aziz, or to the family friend, a businessman named Jho Low. Mr. Low, The Times found, has also been involved in business deals with Malaysia’s sovereign wealth fund, which is a government investment fund.
That fund, called 1MDB, has run into serious financial problems in part because of aggressive borrowing. Investigators in several countries are examining allegations that money from the fund is missing. This month, Swiss authorities said they had frozen several individuals’ bank accounts, and inquiries are underway in Hong Kong and Singapore as well as in Malaysia.
In the United States, officials are examining the real estate tied to Mr. Najib’s stepson and to Mr. Low, which could be seized if a case could be made that the properties had been purchased with the proceeds earned in corrupt practices, according to the people familiar with the investigation. The $681 million payment being investigated falls under United States jurisdiction because it was routed through Wells Fargo, an American bank.
The inquiry is being run by the Justice Department’s Kleptocracy Initiative, which has seized properties in the United States owned by relatives of politicians from Equatorial Guinea, Nigeria, South Korea and Taiwan.
Questions about where Mr. Low and the prime minister’s stepson — a movie producer behind films including “The Wolf of Wall Street” — obtained money for the United States properties have helped fuel political unrest in Malaysia, where several political leaders in the opposition and in Mr. Najib’s own party have called for the prime minister to step down. In the last month, there have been mass street protests, and a global network of nongovernmental organizations, the United Nations Convention Against Corruption, has joined the call for Mr. Najib’s resignation.
Mr. Najib has held fast, denying the corruption allegations and saying the $681 million payment, reported in July by The Wall Street Journal, was not improper. His office told The Times this year that he was not involved in the American properties connected to his stepson and to Mr. Low.
He has also struck back at his questioners and accusers. Over the summer, he dismissed several members of his administration, including the Attorney-General leading one inquiry, and he has barred several opponents from leaving Malaysia, including a member of his own party who was on his way to New York last week. That politician’s lawyer told The Times that he had planned to meet with the F.B.I.
In July, Mr. Najib also shut down a newspaper, The Edge, because of its reports of payments between 1MDB and Mr. Low. On Monday, though, a court in Malaysia reversed the action, ruling that the paper could resume publication as soon as Tuesday. In a separate decision on Monday, a judge ruled that a lawsuit calling for Mr. Najib to return the money that had been transferred into his personal account, and for seizure of his assets around the world, could move forward.
All of that muddies Mr. Najib’s international standing as he prepares to fly to London this week for a trade convention and then on to New York for the opening of the United Nations General Assembly. Since taking office in 2009, Mr. Najib has drawn his country closer to the United States and has used his annual United Nations trips to promote Malaysia as a moderate Muslim partner in the fight against terrorism and as a strategic “Najib really, really values his international image, and he was going out of his way to curry favor with America and with the Europeans,” said John Malott, a United States ambassador to Malaysia in the 1990s. In the current climate, he added, “he can travel, but is he going to be shunned? Are people going to shake hands with him?”
The $150 million in American properties tied to the prime minister’s stepson and to Mr. Low include a penthouse at the Time Warner Center at Columbus Circle in Manhattan purchased for $30.55 million by a shell company connected to Mr. Low’s family trust. Companies tied to Mr. Low’s family have also purchased a $39 million mansion on Oriole Drive in the Hollywood Hills in Los Angeles, the L’Ermitage Hotel in Beverly Hills and part of the Park Lane Hotel in New York. Through shell companies, Mr. Aziz purchased a $33.5 million condominium at the Park Laurel on 63rd Street in Manhattan, a home in Beverly Hills known as the pyramid house for a gold pyramid in its garden, as well as other properties in the Los Angeles area.
The Park Laurel condo and the Beverly Hills home were owned by shell companies connected to Mr. Low’s family before being transferred to shell companies tied to Mr. Aziz. Shell companies — trusts, limited liability companies and other entities — are commonly used in real estate for privacy, wealth transfer or shared ownership. They also make it difficult, however, for law enforcement authorities and others to discover the true owners of property.
In the case of the Beverly Hills home, the property was transferred without any public filings, with Mr. Low’s family trust selling ownership of the shell company to a corporate entity controlled by Mr. Aziz, The Times found.
Mr. Low’s spokesman said this year that the transfers to Mr. Aziz were done at fair market value and at arm’s length. New York City also appears to be home to at least one other person involved with Malaysia’s 1MDB sovereign wealth fund.
A condo at 23 East 22nd Street was purchased for $4.5 million in 2014 by a shell company called Cricklewood One Madison L.L.C. that listed Ai Swan Loo as its authorized signer, public records show. This summer, Malaysia’s Central Bank announced that a person named Jasmine Ai Swan Loo, a former executive involved with the 1MDB fund, was wanted for assistance in its investigation.
In New York, a lawyer for the Cricklewood declined to comment. Ms. Loo did not respond to a note The Times left for her at the condo building, but the concierge confirmed that a Jasmine Ai Swan Loo lived there.
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