Today a completely separate arm of the global 1MDB investigation, the Luxembourg financial regulator CSSF, exacted its own fines against a further bank, Edmond de Rothschild (BPERE).

Today the bank announced it has accepted an 8.99 million Euro fine for its failures in compliance to prevent the blatant money laundering of over $500 million through the bank – all of which was stolen by Jho Low from 1MDB and then sent on as kickbacks to their client Khadem Al Qubaisi, the then Chairman of Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund Aabar and CEO of IPIC.

It was Sarawak Report who broke the news about the payments back in 2015.  Aabar was by then a ‘strategic partner’ of 1MDB and had helped the Malaysian fund raise $6.5 billion in loans, which then largely went missing.

First we revealed how a $20 million payment was made from the Jho Low company Good Star Limited to the Vasco account, later we established that the BVI based Blackstone Asia Real Estate Partners Limited (BAREPL) was also a Jho Low account, which had further transferred a further half billion dollars to Vasco raised during 1MDB’s so-called Power Purchase Bonds in 2012.  We pointed out that similar mega payments were made by the same BAREPL to Najib during the same period.

The Department of Justice just last week documented in detail how this money had been filtered out of 1MDB through bogus off-shore subsidiaries of Aabar into accounts controlled by the tight group of collaborators in moves that were clearly orchestrated by Jho Low with the deliberate and criminal assistence of top officials from 1MDB itself, who were rewarded with their own million dollar kickbacks.  Prime Minister Najib signed off on each and every decision and has subsequently refused to admit to any mistakes or wrong-doings by the fund.

The bank agreed to cooperate with the Luxembourg authorities after its CEO Marc Amboisien resigned last year.  Sarawak Report had long since identified Ambroisien as KAQ’s chief collaborator at the bank – recordings show that Ambroisien acknowledged that the receipt of the half billion into Vasco from 1MDB broke money laundering regulations and that it would not have been accepted by a mainstream bank “like HSBC”.

We revealed that KAQ arranged for Ambroisien to receive an Aston Marton motor car as a gift as a token of his thanks.  It is likely that criminal prosecutions will proceed against individuals involved in the investigation, however today’s settlement represents a clear acknowledgement by the bank that the money was a corrupt payment stolen from Malaysia.

The development adds to the slew of settled cases which prove that billions of dollars worth of ‘wrongdoing’ occured at 1MDB.  The only country in the world which refuses to accept this fact or to continue to investigate the matter is Malaysia itself.

For the past week Najib’s band of remaining supporters have chosen instead to accuse the American Government of “conspiracy” and to manufacture various stories of plots by  opposition figures to use the foreign investigations to undermine the Prime Minister.  What these characters have all signally failed, along with Najib, to provide is a single shred of substantive evidence to contradict the documented money trails, admissions by banks and mounds of evidence that show the conspirators stole the money and then spent it.

Sarawak Report asks if the Malaysian PM and his band of paid up supporters also wish to include Luxembourg in this “plot” and Edmond de Rothschild bank of lying as it admits to this fine?  They cut lonely figures in an argument where the rest of the world has united in identifying this as the largest ever global kleptocracy case