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Brooklyn Federal Prosecutors Charge Ex-Goldman Banker, Fugitive Financier with 1MDB Crimes

By Valentina Pasquali

U.S. prosecutors unveiled criminal charges Thursday against a Malaysian financier and a former Goldman Sachs banker, and announced that another former executive of the New York-based lender has pleaded guilty to laundering nearly $3 billion stolen from 1MDB.

Aided by unnamed associates at “U.S. financial institution #1,” Jho Low, Roger Ng and Tim Leissner “knowingly and willingly” evaded “internal accounting” and anti-graft controls while bribing Malaysian and Abu Dhabi officials to win and retain business for the bank, according to a 34-page indictment and other court documents.

The suspects used shell companies and corporate accounts to funnel hundreds of millions of dollars in funds stolen from Malaysian state fund 1MDB from 2009 to 2014, then bought high-end real estate, jewelry, art and other luxury goods in the United States for themselves and others, including rights to the Hollywood film “The Wolf of Wall Street.”

Court documents do not identify “U.S. financial institution #1” by name, but the publicly available employment history of Ng and Leissner, Goldman Sachs’ known work with 1MDB and a spate of previous reporting on the case point to the New York-headquartered institution.

“The business culture at U.S. financial institution #1, particularly in Southeast Asia, was highly focused on consummating deals, at times prioritizing this goal ahead of the proper operation of its compliance functions,” prosecutors claim in the indictment against Low and Ng.

The theft, which has led to the arrest in Malaysia of former Prime Minister Najib Razak, his wife and a former Treasury official on suspicion of corruption, money laundering and tax evasion, primarily targeted three bond offerings that 1MDB executed through Goldman Sachs in 2012 and 2013 to raise some $6.5 billion.

Goldman Sachs raked in $600 million in revenues and fees from the deals while Ng, Leissner and their associates at the bank received “large bonuses” and saw their reputations “enhanced,” federal prosecutors claim.

Ng, a managing director at Goldman Sachs from 2005 until 2014, and Leissner, the bank’s chairman in Southeast Asia until his suspension in February 2016, partnered with Low in perpetrating the scheme because of the financier’s connections to senior officials in Malaysia and Abu Dhabi who had authority over the bond transactions.

Leissner pleaded guilty Thursday to conspiring to launder money and violate the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act after being indicted in June, and Ng was arrested in Malaysia. Low is now a fugitive from both U.S. and Malaysian authorities.

According to the documents unsealed Thursday, Ng, Leissner and their co-employees at Goldman, including an unnamed Italian national, managed to hide their knowledge of Low’s role in facilitating the transactions—through kickbacks to Malaysian officials and other means—from the bank’s “compliance group and the intelligence group.”

Prosecutors allege the co-conspirators correctly bet they could avoid detection “based on their experience” at Goldman Sachs and in Southeast Asia, the bank’s eagerness to earn “high-fees” from the deals and the ease with which they could circumvent accounting controls.

Their alleged attempts to enlist Low in the scheme began as early as 2009, when the financier served as an independent adviser to the Terengganu Investment Authority, or TIA, a predecessor of 1MDB. From September 2009 to March 2011, the co-conspirators tried on three separate occasions to onboard Low as a client, prosecutors claim.

“Ultimately, these attempts were unsuccessful because certain personnel at U.S. financial institution #1 within the compliance group and the intelligence group refused to approve the business relationship between Low … based in part on concerns that they had about the source of Low’s wealth.”

One of the later bond deals, Project Magnolia, allegedly saw Ng, Leissner, Low and their associates divert nearly $600 million from a $1.8 billion deal that Goldman Sachs arranged and Abu Dhabi’s International Petroleum Investment Company, or IPIC, guaranteed to support 1MDB’s acquisition of Malaysian firm Tanjong Energy Holdings.

They allegedly transferred the funds over the course of a few days in May 2012 to an overseas account of a British Virgin Islands-registered shell company, Aabar Investments PJS Limited, a name chosen to resemble that of IPIC’s legitimate subsidiary, Aabar Investments PJS.

The money, which moved between various shell-company accounts at U.S. and foreign banks, helped fund bribes to Malaysian and Abu Dhabi officials, including Razak and former IPIC Managing Director Khadem al-Qubaisi, in exchange for their approval of the transaction, and also financed what prosecutors described in earlier cases as the co-conspirators’ “lavish lifestyles.”

Al-Qubaisi was arrested in Abu Dhabi two years ago in connection to the 1MDB scandal.

The documents published Thursday do not name Tanjong, IPIC, the two Aabar Investments firms, Najib or al-Qubaisi but their identity is recognizable from past news coverage, as well from U.S. civil complaints filed in July 2016 and June 2017 to recover $1.7 billion in assets allegedly pilfered from 1MDB.

Goldman Sachs continued seeking business from 1MDB through at least the first half of 2014, federal prosecutors claim in the indictment.

Low and Leissner conversed online that summer about needing to “suck up” to a certain 1MDB executive and send “cakes” to the wife of the former Malaysian prime minister.

“A few months after this chat, a bank account owned and controlled by Leissner and his relative was used to transfer approximately $4.1 million to a high-end New York jeweler, in part, to pay for gold jewelry for the wife of Malaysian official #1,” according to prosecutors.

By asserting the suspects acted within the scope of their responsibilities as employees and for the benefit of their employer, prosecutors have set the table for pursuing criminal liability against “U.S. financial institution #1,” said Stefan Cassella, former deputy chief of the Justice Department’s asset forfeiture and money laundering unit.

“The fact that the indictment goes to great lengths to make clear the government is alleging exactly those two things suggests prosecutors are keeping open the option of charging the financial institution,” Cassella, now an attorney with Asset Forfeiture Law in Maryland, said.

The court documents published Thursday also suggest that Goldman Sachs may have run a deficient anti-money laundering program.

“It’s possible internal controls were easy to circumvent, therefore it’s possible that failure to maintain internal controls under the Bank Secrecy Act could be a charge in the future,” Cassella said. “But it seems to me that was more the means by which they committed the act, their true motive, which was getting business through bribery.”

The Justice Department, Federal Reserve, Securities and Exchange Commission and New York State Department of Financial Services and others have launched investigations into whether Goldman Sachs should have identified and reported the role its bankers played in the 1MDB scheme, according to news reports over the past two years.

A spokesperson for Goldman Sachs told ACAMS moneylaundering.com in an email that “the firm continues to cooperate with all authorities investigating this matter.”

Swiss private lenders BSI Bank and Falcon Bank shut down their operations in Singapore and are the subjects of investigations in Switzerland for allegedly handling some of the funds embezzled from 1MDB.

Topics : Anti-money laundering , Asset Forfeiture , Corruption/Bribery , International Banking
Source: U.S.: Department of Justice
Document Date: November 1, 2018