At the start of this week, lawyers for the convicted ex-Goldman banker, Tim Leissner, submitted their arguments for rejecting the appeal for damages brought against him by the PetroSaudi whistleblower, Xavier Justo.

Justo, who exploded the 1MDB scandal, claims he fell victim to the conspiracy in which Liessner was a key player and should therefore receive appropriate compensation as part of Leissner’s sentencing process, as outlined in US law.

Justo’s argument is straightforward, in that Leissner had been a part of the 1MDB conspiracy from the very beginning – starting the day he signed up his bank, Goldman Sachs, as advisors to the precursor Terengganu Investment Fund (TIA) for the raising of an initial billion dollar/RM5 billion bond in 2008 – until the day of the 2018 election when Najib lost office, at which point Leissner instantly liquidated all his assets.

As a member of the inner circle, who over that entire ten year period conspired to steal and then hide and launder over $5 billion from 1MDB, Justo argues that Leissner was an interested and informed party to all the actions that were taken to shut him up after Sarawak Report released his whistleblowing data from 1MDB’s original joint venture partner, the company Petrosaudi, in February 2015.

Leissner not only knew that Justo was telling the truth but was in contact with the other conspirators about the actions being taken to contain the crisis and was, like them, crucially dependent on that containment in order to avoid his own exposure.

Justo therefore argues that, according to US law, he should be compensated from the money that has been forfeited from Leissner for the losses he suffered as a result of his trumped up arrest in Thailand and incarceration in a Bangkok jail for 18 months.

His problems were all thanks to the plot to silence and  discredit him, orchestrated by the web of conspirators who included the directors of PetroSaudi, Jho Low and Prime Minister Najib – as well as Leissner himself.

Indeed, far from drifting away from the 1MDB fraud after raising a third Goldman Sachs bond in 2013, as suggested by Leissner’s lawyers, the banker remained demonstrably contact with Jho Low throughout the period of Justo’s whistleblowing and arrest during which he sought to help the fraudster obtain fresh bank accounts behind the back of his own bosses at Goldman Sachs (it was this activity that eventually resulted in him being sacked in January 2016).

Therefore the plans for controlling the crisis that Justo had triggered during these crucial months must have been known to him as an interested party who was still collaborating with Jho Low and PetroSaudi to cover up the thefts they had all made from 1MDB.

The plan, after all, was for Goldman Sachs to assist in the floatation of 1MDB in order to raise money to plug the gaping holes in its bank accounts. Leissner was at the centre of that plan which he said was nixed thanks to Justo’s revelations.

Leissner Says No!

However, to admit such knowledge would potentially involve Mr Leissner having to surrender more of his remaining considerable wealth to compensate Xavier Justo – over and above the c.$400 million worth of shares that he has already surrendered to the Department of Justice (DOJ) on the basis they were proceeds from his crime.

Neither he nor the DOJ, at least during the earlier stages of the trial, were in favour of doing so. Both submissions stated that Leissner had no knowledge or involvement in the cover-up plans to shut up Justo, despite his close contact with Jho Low who was informing a wide circle about plans for impending action against 1MDB detractors on the grounds the data was “forged”.

Indeed, as a ‘cooperating indicted witness’ Mr Leissner has been given a remarkably soft touch by the US authorities. Not only has he been sentenced to only two years jail for his crucial role in marshalling the world’s most powerful bank behind the world’s largest recorded theft from the people of Malaysia, but a blind eye appears to have been turned to Malaysian money that he is recorded as having received at the time he cashed in his assets on election day 2018.

The money in question is the €145 million that Leissner’s company Midas received in 2017 from a Jho Low controlled company in Kuwait as part of a complex money laundering exercise linked to the 1MDB cover-up (extensively exposed in earlier articles on this website).

Leissner detailed the transaction in his court testimony at the Roger Ng trial, where he acted as a prosecuting witness against his fellow banker from Goldman Sachs.

The banker cum money-launderer paid $39 million from that €145 million to settle a pressing 1MDB coupon payment on behalf of his co-conspirators i.e. Jho Low and Najib.  However, the remainder of the cash has not been accounted for and a grateful DOJ appears not to have pursued the matter so far.

After all, Leissner’s testimony has been vital, the department has explained, in nailing the culpability of Goldman Sachs itself. The bank was forced into a deferred prosecution agreement (DPA) and paid a record fine to the US authorities of $2.9 billion.

Perhaps not coincidentally, the DOJ also initially backed Leissner’s legal argument that Justo’s shocking false arrest and life-threatening experience in jail, resulting in the loss of his entire business, had nothing directly to do with him.

In court last month the US District Judge took their steer in determining that Justo had no call on Leissner’s remaining resources nor on the confiscated money sitting in the US courts.

However, Justo appealed that rejection on the grounds that Leissner can neither credibly claim ignorance nor deny his involvement in everything that happened with 1MDB, including Justo’s treatment.

He brought forward further evidence to that effect and the Appeal Court judges, rather than rejecting his petition, ruled the respondents needed to produce an answer to these sufficiently credible claims by Monday.

Interestingly, the Department of Justice appears to have declined to engage further in combatting Justo’s claim. They have raised no further argument against his petition.

However, Leissner’s lawyers came fighting back with some very interesting claims on the part of their client, which would appear to contradict Leissner’s own testimony in his previous court appearance.

Their main argument is that the judge had correctly determined, based on their own and the DOJ’s previous submissions, that “there is no evidence Leissner knew anything about PetroSaudi or the 1MDB joint venture,”.  Therefore, he could not be liable for what happened to Xavier Justo.

Neither, his lawyers continue, could Leissner have been expected to “reasonably foresee Razak exerting his influence to incarcerate Justo for providing information about PetroSaudi and 1MDB to journalists.” This despite Leissner having admitted as a prosecution witness at the Roger Ng trial in 2022 to relying on Najib’s power to suppress criticism about what was happening at the fund he was party to looting from.

This is the central plank of the argument put forward by Leissner’s legal team in their rejection of Justo’s claim and they baldly state that in expressing this conclusion the judge had relied on a painstaking review “of the factual record, including listening to several days’ of Mr. Leissner’s testimony during the trial in United States v. Ng”.

However, the actual record of Leissner’s testimony records the exact opposite.

Court transcripts show that Leissner made clear that he did know about the investment of 1MDB’s original billion dollars (the “TIA equity Investment”) into a joint venture and, having originally thought that the joint venture with ‘Saudi Petroleum’ referred to the giant Aramco, he had soon realised actual the joint venture partner was a small private company “PetroSaudi”, as announced to the Malaysian media on September 30th 2009.

Leissner also admitted in the Roger Ng trial that he sought for Goldman Sachs to become an advisor to PetroSaudi in the management of that joint venture, which he knew about, and tried to become involved in that investment:

Tim Leissner (TL) “… this joint venture with Saudi Petroleum did not end up being a joint venture with Saudi Petroleum. It ended up being a joint venture with PetroSaudi, not to be confused. It is a much smaller and younger entity than Saudi Petroleum.

Q Did you or Goldman Sachs have any involvement in the joint venture between PetroSaudi and 1MDB?

TL  No, we did not.

Q Did you try and get involved with that JV setup?

TL  Yes, we did. We tried to get involved in it, yes, sir.

Q But you weren’t successful?

TL We weren’t successful.

Q Did you ever subsequently seek business from the PetroSaudi 1MDB joint venture or related to PetroSaudi 1MDB joint venture?

TL Yes, we did.

Q Who is “we”?

TL  Roger and I. Roger in particular. It was became known in the market, and Roger reported this back to me, that 1MDB had set up a $1 billion joint venture with PetroSaudi and had in fact made the investment of a billion dollars in this joint venture. At the time we thought the one — Roger and I discussed this at our office in Kuala Lumpur with a gentleman named Dr. Heuchling, I believe, who was our chair from Malaysia. We wanted to potentially do a foreign exchange business for the billion dollar investment by 1MDB and PetroSaudi. That would have been maybe not as an attractive business, but it was still attractive not for us to want to do that.”

Despite being on record admitting these facts in court 2022, Mr Leissner lawyers in their deposition seeking to deny Justo’s right to damages on Monday, continued to claim that the present judge had been correct in concluding that Tim Leissner had no knowledge of the existence of PetroSaudi or of the PetroSaudi joint venture with 1MDB!

Indeed, their document submitted on Monday even claims that the meeting that Leissner had set up in New York between himself, Najib, Jho Low and the Goldman boss, Lloyd Blankfein, weeks after the 1MDB/PetroSaudi Joint Venture was announced had been to discuss an investment involving ‘Saudi Petroleum’ meaning Aramco!

It would have been pretty poor research by Goldman Sachs who had Jho Low on the end of the phone to have brought their boss to a meeting to discuss a non-existent venture…. and it wasn’t true, according to Leissner’s own testimony above, which makes clear he knew perfectly well who was involved in the joint venture that his lawyers now claim he had never heard of.

This is the revised narrative:

Justo seeks emails that “show that Leissner attended a meeting with Prime Minister Razak regarding 1MDB-PetroSaudi joint venture.” In support, he cites a search warrant application that references a September 26, 2009 email “in connection with a joint venture between 1MDB and a Saudi Arabian oil and gas company.” That email .. is wholly irrelevant to both Justo and PetroSaudi, and undermines Justo’s argument that Mr. Leissner was aware of dealings with PetroSaudi. Mr. Leissner clearly testified that very email relates not to PetroSaudi, but to a different company Saudi Petroleum, also known as Saudi Aramco, further undermining Justo’s restitution claims.”

So, having admitted in court in 2022 that the company in question (which Leissner likes to refer to as ‘Saudi Petroleum’) was actually PetroSaudi, Leissner is now in 2025 attempting to suggest he had thought ‘Saudi Petroleum’ was Aramco and that Aramco was the topic of the 1MDB joint venture investment discussions in New York in November 2009.

This is to back up his new contention that he never knew about PetroSaudi’s existence or that there was a 1MDB joint venture funded by the billion dollars he had helped raise for the TIA.

His motive is to avoid paying Justo any damages from his remaining millions obtained from the thefts involved.

So, do we think Leissner was lying at the trial against his colleague in 2022 or do we think he is lying now?

[for clarification there is no company by the name of ‘Saudi Petroleum’ and the term neither refers to Aramco nor PetroSaudi].