The investigations in Malaysia by the Public Accounts Committee (PAC), the Royal Malaysian Police Force (PDRM) and the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission (MACC) have been shrouded in secrecy and their detailed findings hidden behind the cloak of the Official Secrets Act.
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Najib is not named directly in the filings, but they refer to “Malaysian Official 1”, described as a “high-ranking official” with control over 1MDB.
In Malaysia, the hashtag #MalaysianOfficial1 was trending on Thursday.
Salleh said the donation to the Prime Minister was a separate matter.
The first response from the Malaysian government to the USA actions came around 12 hours later, with a Najib spokesman saying Malaysia will cooperate fully with any lawful investigation of its companies or citizens.
Najib is not named in the papers and has consistently denied wrongdoing, reports BBC. This is a civil action, this is not a criminal action. He said in a statement that none of the probes conducted by law enforcement agencies across the globe over the past year show that any funds were misappropriated from 1MDB.
The move sets up a rare confrontation between US prosecutors and an important partner in the fight against terrorism.
A spokeswoman for the Federal Office of Justice said the paintings were Vincent van Gogh’s La maison de Vincent à Arles and Claude Monet’s Saint-Georges Majeur and Nympheas avec Reflets de Hautes Herbes.
The Justice Department said it will seek to return recovered funds to Malaysia.
“The Malaysian people were defrauded on an enormous scale…” FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe said at the briefing in Washington. Editors of state-run media say they continue to be told what stories can or can’t run.
“It’s our prime minister”, Ambiga Sreenevasan, an activist lawyer, said at a news conference Thursday, which was also addressed by former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, a one-time Najib mentor and now one of his biggest critics.
In late 2015, two China state-owned corporations acquired 1MDB’s Edra Global Energy, the country’s second largest power producer, and a majority interest in the fund’s property development arm for a combined price tag of US$4 billion. Instead, prosecutors want to seize assets as soon as possible.
Goldman Sachs has not been accused of any wrongdoing.
The court papers, filed in Los Angeles, allege that misappropriated 1MDB money was laundered through accounts in the US.
Among them is Najib’s stepson, Riza Shahriz Abdul Aziz, who co-founded movie production studio Red Granite Pictures, and businessman Low Taek Jho who is close to Najib’s family.
The U.S. federal lawsuit lays claim to “any rights to profits, royalties and distribution proceeds” from “The Wolf of Wall Street”.
In a statement, Red Granite said that to its knowledge, “none of the funding it received four years ago was in any way illegitimate”.
It had completed its inspections of DBS, Standard Chartered and UBS and is finalizing its assessment.
The currency retreated as Brent crude’s 2.8 percent decline in five days clouded the outlook for oil-exporting country’s revenues, and after a slew of better-than-expected US data boosted demand for the dollar.
Bandar Malaysia is a 1MDB’s property project. Efforts to reach him for comment on Thursday via his Hong Kong-based company Jynwel Capital were unsuccessful, and the firm didn’t immediately reply to an e-mailed query on the asset seizure.
The DOJ lawsuit presents a potentially thorny issue for the United States and Malaysia, as both countries have grown closer during the administration of President Barack Obama, who has visited the South-east Asian nation twice in the past two years.
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The film was produced by a company owned by Riza using more than $100 million syphoned from 1MDB, according to the US Justice Department.
