Kuala Lumpur
\nMalaysia\u2019s former Prime Minister Najib Razak pleaded not guilty to money-laundering charges slapped on him on Wednesday, as the country\u2019s new government looked for answers to how billions of dollars went missing from a state fund 1MDB during his term.<\/p>\n
Najib and his wife, Rosmah Mansor, were barred from leaving Malaysia after his decade in power ended in a shock election defeat in May, and the new prime minister, Mahathir Mohamad, relaunched an investigation into 1Malaysia Development Berhad.<\/p>\n
Dressed in a grey suit, Najib appeared calm as three charges of money laundering were read out at the Kuala Lumpur high court. He pleaded not guilty, and was granted bail.<\/p>\n
The offence carries a penalty of up to 15 years in jail and a fine of not less than 5 times the value of the proceeds of any illegal transfers, or five million ringgit, whichever is higher.<\/p>\n
Najib was accompanied by his children as he arrived at the courthouse in a four-car motorcade. He left after the proceedings without speaking to the media.<\/p>\n
\u201cSRC, at the time of the so-called happening, was no longer a part of 1MDB. So it\u2019s got nothing to do with 1MDB…,\u201d Najib\u2019s lawyer Muhammad Shafee Abdullah told reporters outside the court.<\/p>\n
SRC, created in 2011 by Najib\u2019s government to pursue overseas investment in energy resources, was a unit of 1MDB until it was moved to the finance ministry in 2012.<\/p>\n
When asked if he thinks the case was a witch hunt, Shafee said: \u201cMy client and I hope that\u2019s not the case\u201d.<\/p>\n
High Court Judge Mohamad Nazlan Mohd Ghazali said a decision on when the trial begins, and on a gag order issued last month to stop public discussion of the case, would be made on Friday.<\/p>\n
Najib has consistently denied any wrongdoing, maintaining that those funds were donations from a Saudi royal, and that the bulk of them had been given back.<\/p>\n
Reopening the investigations into 1MDB after Najib lost power, Malaysian anti-graft officers have revealed how their earlier investigations were obstructed by Najib\u2019s government.<\/p>\n
SRC has been the initial focus of Malaysian investigators as all the suspicious transactions involving it went through Malaysian entities, unlike other 1MDB-related transactions that went through foreign banks and companies.<\/p>\n
Money allegedly siphoned off from SRC represents only a small fraction of the billions of dollars misappropriated from 1MDB, according to lawsuits filed in the US courts by the Department of Justice which investigated the scandal.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Kuala Lumpur Malaysia\u2019s former Prime Minister Najib Razak pleaded not guilty to money-laundering charges slapped on him on Wednesday, as the country\u2019s new government looked for answers to how billions of dollars went missing from a state fund 1MDB during his term. Najib and his wife, Rosmah Mansor, were barred from leaving Malaysia after his […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":38584,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[87],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-38583","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38583","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38583"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38583\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":38585,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38583\/revisions\/38585"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/38584"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38583"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38583"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38583"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}