A New York court has found Ng, 49, once Malaysia’s top investment banker, guilty of helping his former boss Tim Leissner embezzle money raised for the benefit of poor Malaysia from an affiliated fund. with the then Prime Minister of Malaysia, Najib Razak, and then laundered my income while bribing officials in Malaysia and Abu Dhabi. Ng was acquitted of conspiracy and money laundering under foreign anti-corruption laws. Ng’s lawyers had argued that Leissner, a collaborating government witness who pleaded guilty to similar charges in 2018, had falsely convicted him. The charges against the two men stemmed from a plot in which Goldman helped 1MDB raise $ 6.5 billion through three bond sales. However, $ 4.5 billion was allocated to government officials, bankers and their associates between 2009 and 2015. The funds were used, in part, to fund the affluent lifestyle of Malaysian playboy fugitive Jho Low, who embarked on an impressive spree of spending, including luxury apartments, yachts, Impressionist works of art and movies such as The Wolf of Wall. Martin Scorsese. . Ng is the first and probably the only person to face a lawsuit in the United States for the program. Goldman paid nearly $ 3 billion in fines in 2020, and its Malaysian subsidiary agreed to plead guilty. During the trial, Leissner testified for nine days as defense attorneys questioned his credibility and drew attention to allegations that he was married to two different women when he married Kimora Lee Simmons, model, reality TV star and designer Baby Phat, in 2014. “Tim Leissner is using people,” Ng’s defense attorney Marc Agnifilo told jurors last month. He was “married to two different women at the same time, twice” and had an “illegal” relationship with another, Agnifilo said in his introductory remarks. Agnifilo said in recent arguments that Leissner could not be trusted. But the jurors rejected this argument and sided with the prosecutors. The verdict represents a victory for the US Department of Justice, which tried to hold Goldman Sachs accountable for crimes committed under the guise of a corporation. These principles were set out in a 2015 note by then-Deputy Attorney General Sally Gates, who stated that “a company only acts through individuals, investigating individuals’ behavior is the most effective and efficient way to identify facts and the extent of any corporate misconduct “. The note was updated in 2020 with a set of principles, according to which individual accountability “prevents future illegal activity, motivates changes in corporate behavior, ensures that appropriate parties are held accountable for their actions and promotes public confidence in our judicial system “. .
