Justo’s original six-year sentence was cut in half after he pleaded guilty Monday at a Bangkok court.
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In a written confession, Justo said earlier that he had met Clare Rewcastle Brown, a campaigning British journalist, as he tried to sell corporate data about PetroSaudi’s dealings with 1MDB, the scandal-plagued Malaysian state investment fund.
Swiss national Xavier Andre Justo has been brought to the Bangkok South Criminal Court for his PetroSaudi blackmail case. He was arrested in June on the island of Koh Samui, where he was living at the time.
Justo had given interviews, claiming among others that he had purportedly been promised failed to receive RM7.7 million from Datuk Dr Toong Kooi Ong, who owned The Edge Media Group, for documents allegedly over financial abuse in ventures between PetroSaudi and 1Malaysia Development Bhd (1MDB).
She runs the London-based Sarawak Report website that covers corruption allegations in Malaysia, where she was born. Najib has denied any wrongdoing, and called the leaking of documents a political plot against him.
Justo had previously claimed he was offered US$2 million to share the stolen data with an unidentified Malaysian group, but he was never paid.
A string of Malaysian and overseas investigative reports this year have alleged that hundreds of millions of dollars in 1MDB money went missing from the PetroSaudi deals. “In the end he surrendered it for free”.
The lawyer also explained, according to a report in Malay Mail Online, that although the former PSI executive had signed a written confession that he had stolen data from the company when he left in 2011, the law still required that he enter his plea in a court of law.
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Justo, 49, confessed to taking information about 1MDB from PSI, an energy company.
