Najib’s eighth defence witness denied that MACC investigators had just “cut and pasted” pre-prepared and completed statements from both the purported Saudi prince’s representative and Low Taek Jho’s associate Eric Tan Kim Loong during the 2015 Saudi trip.
But today,M ohd Nasharudin Amir — who was MACC’s investigating officer for the RM2.6 billion in Najib’s bank accounts — said that MACC had gone to Saudi Arabia to just “cut and paste” those two individual’s statements for the investigations, without asking any questions and without getting any documents.
Testifying as the ninth defence witness in Najib’s 1MDB trial, Nasharudin said MACC had recorded the alleged prince Prince Saud’s representative Mohamad Abdullah Al-Koman’s statement and Tan’s statement on November 29, 2015 in a palace in Saudi Arabia.
Mohamad Abdullah had given his statement to the MACC allegedly on behalf of a “Prince Saud Abdulaziz Majid Al Saud”, who purportedly promised to give millions of US dollars as “gifts” to Najib through four “donation” letters including via Tanore Finance Corporation. Tan was Tanore’s owner….
The trip by five officers (four from MACC, one from the Attorney-General’s Chambers) from November 27 to November 30, 2015 was intended to verify if the four alleged donation letters were genuine and written by Prince Saud, and if the RM2.6 billion were donations from Prince Saud to Najib.
But when asked about the November 29, 2015 meeting between the five-man Malaysian team with three alleged Saudi princes at a palace in Saudi Arabia, Nasharudin told Najib’s lawyer Wan Azwan Aiman Wan Fakhruddin that he was “not sure” if investigators had met Prince Saud there.
Explaining why he was unsure if he had met Prince Saud there, Nasharudin said he did not know this individual and he was not introduced to this alleged prince.
Nasharudin said Prince Saud was introduced to the “bosses”, namely Tan Sri Azam Baki who was MACC’s director of investigations (now MACC chief), and Tan Sri Dzulkifli Ahmad who represented the AGC (and later became MACC chief)…
Confirming he did not do any profiling such as looking at photographs of these alleged princes before the Saudi trip, Nasharudin said other officers in the Malaysian delegation had only looked at the alleged Prince Saud’s passport briefly before it was returned.
MACC officer Datuk Mohd Hafaz Nazar then recorded statements from both Prince Saud’s representative and Tan in a separate room, while Nasharudin assisted Hafaz in recording those statements.
Nasharudin said he was “not satisfied” with the statement recorded from Prince Saud via the latter’s representative, and later also confirmed that Prince Saud was not present when his representative’s statement was taken.
This testimony has been produced as part of Najib’s DEFENSE. You might call it friendly fire.
It effectively confirms what SR reported at the time, which was that Najib had sent a bogus delegation to Saudi Arabia to conduct a sham investigation designed to substantiate his claim that money in his bank account stolen from 1MDB had been a ‘gift’ from a young Saudi prince.
In turn, this gift was supposed to have been authorised on behalf of the Saudi King himself, according to the extended (if inconsistent) narrative promoted by Najib.
Once the Malaysian team of five arrived a hilarious (if it were not so disgraceful) charade was apparently entered into, whereby the current head of Malaysia’s anti-corruption commission (which did and still does answer to the prime minister himself) was introduced to indirectly interview the alleged princely donor.
In attendance were Jho Low’s sidekick, Eric Tan, himself a prime suspect as the owner of Tanore, the company that transferred the cash in question, and Prince Turki also a prime suspect having been a key shareholder of PetroSaudi from which $1.83 billion of 1MDB cash had also disappeared.
The idea was that Eric Tan and the prince would give statements. At immediate issue in the court is the claim that these statements had already been drawn up for them by the investigators from Malaysia to explain away any notion of wrong doing.
Prince Turki plainly acted as fixer and did the talking while the so-called donor kept silent having flashed a passport, of which no copies were actually taken by the Malaysians, to supposedly establish his ID as the author of letters to the bank which claimed he had gifted over a billion dollars in total to Najib.
A ‘representative’ of this silent young man then went into another room with the Malaysian officers to make the allegedly pre-prepared declaration on behalf of his absent boss. How conveniently deniable for the prince concerned.
Naturally, the statement confirmed the excuse concocted by Najib and Jho Low that the billion dollars that had entered Najib’s bank account via Tan’s offshore company Tanore had been donated by this silent young prince, believed to be a relative of Jho Low’s co-conspirator Prince Turki who appears to have been orchestrating the Saudi side of this staged event.
Except, as the money trails obtained through the international banking system by the FBI have made absolutely clear, this money originated from 1MDB itself rather than any Saudi royal.
Najib would like the court to believe he didn’t realise that… or better still, that the FBI and banking system must have got things wrong.
However, if this Malaysian investigating team had really been so interested in getting to the truth of such matters they could, of course, have organised their trip in a very different way – i.e. in a proper formal manner.
Specifically, where were the Saudi officials to host this discussion and to verify the Prince’s papers and his identity, and likewise where was the official palace representative or government minister to verify the Prince’s role as the delegate of the king?
And, where were the banking officials and documents to prove the money had come from this young prince’s own resources or from the King through him?
Answer, the above were nowhere to be seen.
If Najib and his officials had been carrying out a genuine mission of enquiry in 2015 they could have proven quite easily in Saudi Arabia that the donation letters were a sham. That was already obvious anyway.
Had Najib turned on Jho Low at that point and acknowledged his own ‘deception’ instead of spending the next three years denying the truth and indulging in such ludicrous attempts at a cover-up, he might have a better chance now of convincing the court of his innocence in this affair.
Instead, his defence seems to be that he was the one person on the planet who remained deceived until the day he was arrested.