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Showing posts with label Low Taek Jho. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Low Taek Jho. Show all posts

Friday 29 June 2018

Goldman Lunch at Taste Paradise Sets Table for 1MDB Money Probe

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2018-06-28/goldman-bankers-in-focus-in-1mdb-money-probe-video


https://youtu.be/tW9Q7v8pioY

Low Taek Jho and an official from 1MDB had hired Goldman Sachs Group to underwrite the US$1.75 billion bond offering.

SINGAPORE: In a private dining room at Singapore's Taste Paradise restaurant, over a meal of abalone and suckling pig, two Goldman Sachs Group Inc bankers were explaining a US$1.75 billion bond offering to six executives of a Swiss bank.

It was early 2012, and joining Goldman bankers Roger Ng and Tim Leissner that day were a young Malaysian financier named Low Taek Jho and an official from state investment fund 1Malaysia Development Bhd, known as 1MDB, which had hired the New York bank to underwrite the bond sale.

Now, people familiar with the matter say, investigators from Singapore to the United States are looking more closely at the roles of Mr Ng and Mr Leissner, who have both left Goldman. And they're asking what happened in that private dining room named after the first emperor of a unified China, Qin Shi Huang.

In particular, they're examining how US$577 million in proceeds from a bond sale that May ended up a day later in an account at BSI SA in Switzerland - the same bank whose executives were at the Taste Paradise.

Click here for the full report: Goldman Sachs lunch at Singapore's Taste Paradise set the scene for 1MDB's money probe

The lunch, previously unreported, brought together the key parties in what has become the biggest financial scandal in Malaysia's history, involving the alleged misappropriation of US$4.5 billion of 1MDB funds. It was the culmination of numerous conversations as BSI bankers and compliance officials sought clarity on the deal.


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Wednesday 7 March 2018

Shocking news and curious comments

  

Why bother to formulate a new law to check fake news when the real stories are already incredible?


' There must be better explanations for such incredible reports and the bizarre responses from people in power.'


OVER the past week, the news about Malaysia has been running the range from the outrageous to the absurd.

To use a quirky English phrase, the stories beggar belief. In other words, too surreal to be believed.

With the Government proposing a new law to check the spread of “fake news”, there must be better explanations for such incredible reports and the bizarre responses from people in power.

I am listing three examples. The first is Switzerland’s decision to confiscate the equivalent of RM400mil, purportedly linked to 1Malaysia Develop­ment Bhd (1MDB), which was seized from Swiss banks last year.

The Swiss lawmakers are set to debate a motion to en­­able part of the funds to be sent back to Malaysia, but according to recent reports, there were no claimants for the money. For context, the RM400mil is more than this year’s budget for my home state of Melaka and the surplus of RM26.4mil can pay for the new bridge on the alternative coastal road in Klebang.

Next is the 91m super yacht, Equanimity, impounded off Bali last Wednesday.

Indonesian police seized the vessel sought by the US Department of Justice (DoJ) in response to a Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) request to enforce a court order.

Police spokesman Muhammad Iqbal Abduh said the US$250mil (RM976mil) yacht’s Auto­ma­ted Identification System (AIS) had been switched off in nearby seas before the seizure.

Penang-born businessman Low Taek Jho, who is also known as Jho Low, criticised the DoJ for not proving any offence before acting.

“It is disappointing that, rather than reflecting on the deeply flawed and politically motivated allegations, the DoJ is continuing with its pattern of global overreach – all based on entirely unsupported claims of wrongdoing,” read a statement sent by his unnamed spokesman.

Eyebrows were raised when Attorney-General Tan Sri Mohamed Apandi Ali said the Government would not claim the yacht.

But Communications and Multimedia Minister Datuk Seri Salleh Said Keruak’s peculiar comment that the DoJ had not shown any “tangible proof” of Low’s ownership of the yacht drew ire and scorn.

He said besides allegations in the civil suit, on hold since last August, there was no evidence of Low’s ownership.

As former minister of trade and industry Tan Sri Rafidah Aziz noted, all it takes is a simple search. The “SuperYacthFan” website, which has a directory of the world’s wealthiest yacht owners, states that it belongs to Low and his Hong-Kong-based investment fund, Jynwel Capital.

If Low is innocent, the solution is simple: Just bite the bullet and face the DoJ.

The third curious case involves Criminal Investigation Department (CID) director Comm Datuk Seri Wan Ahmad Najmuddin Mohd’s frozen Australian bank account.

Australian police froze the A$320,000 (RM970,490) account after filing a forfeiture application in the New South Wales Supreme Court in March last year. 

Strangely, the senior police officer does not want his almost RM1mil back. His reason? High legal costs.

Australian police noted a “flurry of suspicious cash deposits” into the CID director’s account, which had been dormant since it was first opened in 2011.

The account reportedly grew by nearly A$290,000 (RM879,500) in a month in 2016, mostly in deposits below A$10,000 (RM30,330) – the limit for law enforcement agencies to receive possible money-laundering alerts.

The money came in from branches and ATMs around the country, from the tiny towns in Queensland and in Tasmania to the major cities of Sydney and Melbourne, a week after the officer visited Australia.

In response, Inspector-General of Police Tan Sri Mohamad Fuzi Harun said an inquiry found that the account was opened in 2011 to enable the transfer of funds to finance the CID director’s son’s education in Australia.

The IGP said the dormant account was reactivated in 2016 for the officer’s daughter’s master’s degree, adding that Comm Wan Ahmad Najmuddin provided documents to prove the money was from the sale of a RM700,000 house in Shah Alam.

Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission deputy chief commissioner Datuk Seri Azam Baki initially ruled out any further probe as both Deputy Prime Minister Datuk Seri Dr Ahmad Zahid Hamidi and the IGP had exone­rated the CID director. However, Azam has since been quoted as saying the MACC had begun investigating the matter following a report lodged by an unidentified whistleblower.

Deputy Home Minister Datuk Nur Jazlan Mohamed provided another queer twist to the case by suggesting that Australian authori­ties were using the media to embarrass Malaysia and by asking if they had an axe to grind.

With more doubts continuing to be raised over the case, Dr Ahmad Zahid said Comm Wan Ahmad could have been “a little naïve” about Australia’s legal system.

We can’t blame Malaysians to be sceptical, given the status of the person in question.

Naïve or not, just how costly can it be to hire a good lawyer in Australia to seek justice for the huge amount of money wrongly confiscated?

There have been such cases before and Malaysians have won, most notably former Selangor mentri besar Tan Sri Muhammad Muhammad Taib.

On May 1998, he was acquitted of currency regulation breaches involving more than A$1.2mil (RM2.9mil then).

Muhammad had pleaded not guilty to knowingly making a false currency report when entering the country on Dec 16, 1996, and then failing to declare currency when leaving six days later.

Besides saying that the ex-teacher’s English was not good, his lawyers argued that he didn’t know the country’s money exchange laws and that the funds were for buying land for himself and his three brothers.

How much he paid the lawyers remains a mystery, though.

Veera PandiyanMedia consultant M. Veera Pandiyan likes this quote by Albert Einstein: Whoever is careless with the truth in small matters cannot be trusted with important matters.

Along The Watchtower by M.Veera Pandiyan The Star



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