As reported in London’s Sunday Observer, it is now confirmed that the $1.83 billion legal suit initiated by 1MDB against the major transatlantic law firm White & Case, which acted for PetroSaudi in the fraudulent joint venture that cost Malaysian taxpayers billions of ringgit, has sparked both regulatory and criminal investigations in the UK.

Following revelations last week that the UK Solicitors Regulatory Authority is examining the actions of White & Case’s London Office, the Chief Commissioner of the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission (MACC), Azam Baki, released a statement confirming UK authorities have been engaged in a criminal investigation launched by the MACC into the firm following a mutual legal assistance request.

We can confirm that the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission (MACC) is currently undertaking investigations in relation to the law firm concerned. The scope of the investigation includes, among others, the preparation of documentation and payment instructions which are suspected to contain inaccuracies or to have been misleading, and which may have contributed to the misdirection of funds linked to 1MDB.
The investigation is also examining payments made to the firm that are believed to involve funds potentially connected to the alleged misappropriation of 1MDB assets……. In order to support and advance the investigation, MACC is in the process of seeking further information and documentation through formal channels, including via the Attorney General’s Chambers (AGC) and Mutual Legal Assistance (MLA) arrangements with the United Kingdom authorities…. cooperation and communication between the relevant agencies remain ongoing and constructive.”

Enquires by Sarawak Report have established that these ongoing investigations involve the UK’s International Anti Corruption Coordination Centre which comes under Britain’s National Crime Agency.

The NCA has said it does not comment on ongoing investigations and White & Case told journalists that it is not aware of criminal investigations in the UK.   However, that statement was followed by a further update from the MACC Chief Commissioner in which he said the agency has now completed its own investigations into the law firm “with a recommendation for charges to be filed against several individuals”.

Sarawak Report has established that at least one of those individuals is among those named in 1MDB’s civil suit currently lodged both against White & Case and Patrick Mahony, the PetroSaudi manager already convicted of fraud in Switzerland.

UK anti-corruption campaigners have told Sarawak Report that any engagement by the NCA would  represent a major development in tackling the country’s problem with so-called professional enablers of global corruption.

“This investigation is a significant step towards unprecedented scrutiny of the London lawyers whose services paved the way for corrupt elites to siphon off billions in public funds.
For far too long, major law firms caught up in global corruption scandals have escaped effective accountability for their role as witting or unwitting enablers of dirty money.
Any enforcement action against White & Case would send a shockwave through the legal profession and shatter the illusion of impunity that some law firms may be too big to be called to account by the regulator.”
[Dr Helen Taylor, Dep Director Spotlight on Corruption]

‘Professional Enablers’?

From the day Sarawak Report broke the story of 1MDB’s Heist of the Century, the role of White & Case, the lawyers for the fund’s ‘joint venture partner’, PetroSaudi, has featured at the forefront of much of the fraud uncovered.

Like the bankers Goldman Sachs, who have been fined billions for their enabling role, the prestige law firm provided the conspirators with an invaluable cover and patina of respectability, thereby assisting troublingly hasty and unusual  transactions to go ahead, despite the multiple red flags involved.

Testifying in court last year, 1MDB’s CEO described the false sense of security offered by the firm’s involvement as PetroSaudi’s legal advisors and Baker & MacKenzie (Wong & Partners) who represented 1MDB: “I was not suspicious at all of the name PetroSaudi Holdings (Cayman) Ltd that was different from the name PetroSaudi International Ltd as it was prepared by a 1MDB officer who was an expert with the help of famous lawyers”, he said of one such anomaly (Jho Low’s signature sleight was using similar names for connected off-shore companies but with completely different controlling entities to funnel cash).

Now, that Malaysia’s ability to take action and access necessary information has been revived (following years of powerful obstruction) efforts are at last being made to hold the law firm to account, not just for negligence and incompetence but for complicity. 1MDB’s staggering $1.83 billion legal suit against White & Case amounts to the entire sum 1MDB alleges the law firm ‘dishonestly assisted‘ its clients and their co-conspirators in stealing from the sovereign fund.

The case was lodged in KL at the end of 2024, following the conviction of the two prime movers at PetroSaudi itself, shareholder Tarek Obaid and director Patrick Mahony, by the Swiss Courts (the two men are appealing lengthy jail sentences).

White & Case immediately sought to get Malaysia’s case thrown out on the grounds of jurisdiction and delay, however those claims were dismissed by the KL High Court in December on the grounds that White & Cases’ clients, PetroSaudi, had submitted to Malaysian jurisdiction to do business with the sovereign fund and the delay was due to obstruction by fraudsters in high office.

An inevitable appeal against that ruling will be heard in May. Meanwhile, the details of the pleadings against the law firm allege shocking charges of “dishonest assistance” and “conspiracy to injure by unlawful means“, squarely based on the facts originally reported in this blog and the questions we have raised since 2015 about the firm’s baffling insouciance over the suspicious transactions they supported.

W&C Represented PetroSaudi ‘at all Material Times During Fraud’

The nub of 1MDB’s civil law suit is that not only had White & Case “wilfully and recklessly failed to make such inquiries as an honest and reasonable person would make” in their engagement with the initial joint venture deal with 1MDB, where the fund ploughed $1 billion into a worthless PetroSaudi subsidiary which White & Case helped to present as a major oil licensee, but that even after White & Case could hold no remaining doubts that the PetroSaudi vehicle was a fraud, the law firm continued to assist in the raising of a further $833 million in 1MDB loans against the non-existent value of that company.

In the initial joint venture PetroSaudi claimed to have injected a $2.7 billion asset into the shared company through a bogus oil extraction license in Turkmenistan when in fact it did not own the license and, besides, the license had no value in a disputed territory for the foreseeable future.

White & Case ought surely to have realised this at the time they injected the ‘asset’ into the joint venture, not least because it was registered with a Jersey Company that was publicly described as having zero value unless an option to buy into the target oil license was activated.

The same public company documents also pointed out that even if the asset was acquired it would be only worth a maximum of $500m and only after six years, not the value of $2.7 bn that PetroSaudi claimed.

How could lawyers managing the documentation have missed these openly declared facts, which Sarawak Report picked it up from an online enquiry, and why did White & Case not wait for an independent credible valuation to be obtained, which they did not, before signing off on the venture, as had been demanded by the 1MDB board as its prerequisite?

There was a further Argentinian ‘oil asset’ that was likewise injected into the joint venture company by PetroSaudi, which White & Case plainly did know was worthless. In an email to their colleagues a week before the JV was signed a White & Case lawyer specifically described the Argentinian company as having a “disposal value [of] almost nil” for tax purposes.

Yet, the Joint Venture Agreement signed on 28th September 2009 endorsed the value of the joint venture company, set up under the auspices of White & Case, at $2.7 billion based on the portfolio of these two oil assets.

If White & Case were missing red flags others, meanwhile, did not. Another big name, the auditors PWC, had been approached to provide the required independent valuation for the company to be produced before this completion date but refused on the grounds there was not enough time (less than a week) to do an acceptable job.

PetroSaudi would use “another competent authority as PWC is being too slow” Mahony had told the venture’s original BSI bankers who had warned on September 24th that their compliance department had insisted “Valorization of Argentinean and Turkmenistan’s Assets : very important to get please”. White & Case exhibited no such concerns and continued to vouch for their client.

Mahony fell back on a friendly contact, the US banker, Ed Morse, whom he hired for $100,000 to do the lightening valuation job on the basis only of information provided by PetroSaudi and without a site visit: “We are looking for a mid-range of $2.5b” explained Mahony in an email.  “OK got it!” responded Morse and added a disclaimer to his one-sided valuation to that effect (he in fact came in at $2.9 billion plus).

Despite this dubious process, the Malaysian suit complains, White & Case, although aware of the requirement for a full independent valuation, nonetheless endorsed the document. Indeed, the valuation was not even delivered by Morse until the 29th September, the day after the Joint Venture was executed on the understanding that the assets were worth at least $2,7 billion.

There is no question that White & Case knew the valuation had not been received, let alone vetted, as their legal team were still asking PetroSaudi for it on 29th September in order to send it on to 1MDB. It arrived that evening. If they had read the valuation document the lawyers would have noted Ed Morse’s disclaimer and the obvious fact that the valuation was neither independent nor verified. Yet, they raised no concerns about continuing with the process of sending demands for payment the following day, 30th September.

It was not just PWC who were too uneasy to go ahead. BSI Bank also pulled out of opening accounts for the joint venture and the PetroSaudi holding company just a couple of days after pressing for the valuation details on September 28th. It seems Mahony had spooked them during the same email exchange by describing the planned diversion of $700 million dollars PetroSaudi from 1MDB’s investment as a “premium” (commission) that the fund had agreed to pay.

A compliance officer from Geneva’s BSI branch wrote at the time “I don’t like the transaction at all! In particular the role and involvement of Mr Low Taek Jho ‘looks and feels’ very subspicious [sic] to me.” [DOJ Complaint]. 

Jho Low had no official status in the transaction as the bank had ascertained. Indeed, several messages from the fraudster sought to remind the officials at 1MDB and PetroSaudi to keep his name out of official communications and that emails should not be openly copied to him. Sarawak Report has evidence that White & Case lawyers were nonetheless aware of Jho Low’s involvement by this stage, yet appear not to have shared the same concerns.

Jho was present at their London offices (albeit in a separate room) during the key negotiations between PetroSaudi and 1MDB’s top management and legal team on 23rd September. Brian Chia of Wong & Partners has testified he was introduced to him on that occasion by 1MDB’s CEO as Najib’s unofficial advisor.

Emails from Patrick Mahony to the White & Case team confirm the law firm was likewise in the loop. Given the orders by Jho, these mentions were a slip up but they reveal the W&C lawyers knew who Jho and his lawyer Tiffany Heah were. For example, the day following the negotiations Mahony emailed White & Case to gain their consent for Jho’s lawyer, Tiffany Heah to be allowed back into their London offices to look over the resulting documents before they were sent to be signed by Najib.

“Gentlemen – it is becoming quite important that we sign all of the docs and finalise the new structure by end of day tomorrow… Jho has just called and asked that tiffany do a minimum of dd [legal due diligence] on the new structure by at least seeing all of the signed docs (1.5b shares issued, 700m loan, that 1mdb owns PSI cayco). Is this achievable? Can we have all of the docs ready tomorrow for tarek to sign and then she can come and seen them all signed at some point in the afternoon? I have no issues doing this and in fact like it.” [email from Patrick Mahony to White & Case 24th Sept 2009]

The smoking gun email confirms the White & Case legal team knew who Jho and lawyer Tiffany were (indeed had met them the day before in their offices) and understood their role as supervisors of the deal on behalf of Najib.

It is notable that 1MDB’s own lawyers, Wong & Partners (a subsidiary of Baker & McKenzie against whom proceedings have now been dropped by 1MDB) had itself issued a rare Memorandum of Concern to warn the Board just before the joint venture was signed, on 26th September after Brian Chia arrived back from London.

The worries expressed by 1MDB’s legal advisors included that failure to obtain the obligatory independent valuation of PetroSaudi before injecting the billion dollars. The warning was overruled by Najib Razak as prime minister who had taken over all ultimate decision-making at the fund.

It is now well-known that $700 million of the initial billion dollar ‘investment’ made by 1MDB after the signing of that joint venture disappeared straight into the Good Star Limited account at Coutts Zurich belonging to Jho Low, on the pretext of a bogus loan repayment demand sent under the auspices of White & Case (the remaining $300 million would be siphoned out of the joint venture company by PetroSaudi itself and therefore also stolen).

In its briefing to 1MDB and its legal team, White & Case stated that the Good Star Limited account was “in the name of PetroSaudi” thereby falsely implying the company belonged to PetroSaudi and not the prime minister’s own proxy in the deal, namely Jho Low.

Further Borrowings Based On Bogus Assets

Even if White & Case failed to spot this initial fraud despite so many red flags, the Malaysian suit argues that all avenues for pleading ignorance over PetroSaudi’s fraudulent claims ended straight after the $1 billion payment was made, at which point PetroSaudi had instructed the law firm to cancel the Turkmenistan ‘option agreement’ under which the company at least held a right to purchase the oil extraction license they had implied they owned.

From that point of cancellation on 24th November 2009, the law suit argues, White & Case were fully aware that PetroSaudi retained no assets of genuine value in the joint venture company. Nonetheless, the law firm continued to help structure a further $833 million in so-called Islamic loans which were made between 2010-2011 by 1MDB to PetroSaudi, guaranteed on the basis of what White & Case knew to be those non-existent assets. The law suit alleges that this was dishonest assistance and misrepresentation of their client.

The board of 1MDB received no notice of the cancellation of the option agreement and continued to sign off on these loans to PetroSaudi’s off shore shell companies owing to the fraudulent claims.

Deal Was Already Done & Dusted Say White & Case

In response to these charges White & Case have issued strong denials.  Global Investigations Review reports that in its response to the civil suit the law firm has said it ‘could not have dishonestly assisted and conspired to defraud 1MDB, as claimed, because [it] played no role in negotiating the terms of the commercial arrangements between PetroSaudi and 1MDB, with “all major commercial terms” agreed before White & Case was even hired.‘ Similar arguments have been directed at Sarawak Report.

The claim conflicts with 1MDB’s contention that the firm represented PetroSaudi “at all material times” during the fraud, certainly from September 18th 2009, which was the day that all the formal parties to the deal were themselves being introduced.

That was the date Jho Low connected the director of PetroSaudi, Tarek Obaid, to the CEO of 1MDB through a telling email in which he stated to the key figures from the two companies that “discussions [are] on track with respect to your USd2.5b JVC partnership”.

Further emails show White & Case on the same day assisted PetroSaudi with the incorporation of the two key PetroSaudi subsidiaries to be involved in the joint venture. These were PetroSaudi Holdings (Cayman) Limited and the carefully named 1MDB PetroSaudi Limited (BVI) in which 1MDB was due to buy a minority shareholding for a billion dollars, according to advance plans drawn up by Jho Low’s own team and sent to the PetroSaudi fixer Patrick Mahony and Tarek Obaid four days earlier on September 14th.

Later on that same day, September 18th, the directors of the Board of 1MDB were also first notified of the Joint Venture plan by the management team.

The White & Case claim that commercial terms had already been agreed implies the law firm was indeed aware of Jho Low’s third party role behind the scenes. Documents and emails prove that throughout the negotiations their legal team was working from structures and plans that had already been drawn up by Jho’s team and lawyer in advance which were then forwarded to White & Case on various pretexts.

The key Joint Venture Agreement document that provided for the bogus $700 loan to be defrauded from 1MDB was drawn up by Jho’s lawyer Tiffany Heah on 21st September and sent to PetroSaudi’s Patrick Mahony, who in turn sent it to White & Case. Mahony then arranged with Jho and Tiffany to get the document sent again, this time officially from Wong & Partners as well to give an impression of due process.

White & Case lawyers then revised the document with minor amendments putting the document under the firm’s own official heading.

Other subsequent documents relating to the structure of the deal, the restructuring of the PetroSaudi group, the Loan Agreement and subsequent ‘repayment’ demand were likewise drafted during the period 14-29th September by Jho’s team and sent to Patrick Mahony. The key points in these documents were then incorporated into the official papers then produced by White & Case with their letterhead (see above).

White & Case may seek to argue the firm was unaware that the details they were working from had been supplied by Jho Low. However, correspondence makes clear members of the team were aware by the end of this process of the role of Najib’s informal advisor including the request that Jho’s lawyer should be allowed into White & Case to check off on the final documents.

Verifying A Fraudulent Bank Account?

(b) Account details for payment of 700,000,000 USD to an account in the name of PetroSaudi International Limited (Saudi)

To:                             J P Morgan Chase Bank, New York, USA.
ABA:                           21 000 021
Swift:                         CHASUS33
Account:                     544-7-44876
In favour of:                  RBS Coutts Bank Ltd
Swift:                         COUTCHZZ
Reference:                   For further credit to account 11116073

Due Diligence?

“We strongly refute any suggestion that White & Case acted in any way inconsistent with the highest ethical and professional standards. We are vigorously defending ourselves against the allegations in the complaint, which have no legal or factual bases.”

[By the Editor Of Sarawak Report]

I learned I’d been made ‘subject to an anonymity order’ only after my attention was drawn to a report in the UK Law Society Gazette.

The article explained that there had been a hearing of the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal (SDT) at which the Solicitors Regulatory Authority (SRA), in prosecuting a complaint I had made about the law firm Hamlins, had agreed that the identities of several witnesses and entities should not be disclosed, including me. The SDT had made an order to that effect.

No one had warned me about the proposed secrecy order or notified me about the hearing at which it was made; to me it felt like a stitch up. When I asked to see the memorandum that was issued, to understand the extent of the restrictions and who else was to be ‘anonymised’, I was told that the Respondent (defending party), a solicitor at Hamlins, had objected.  Instead, I was issued only with a three line instruction:
“The Tribunal orders that the disclosure or publication of any matter likely to lead to the identification of any person, entity or other matter anonymised in the proceedings is PROHIBITED.”

I was not enlightened as to what ‘matters, persons or entities’ had been anonymised (20 names and 81 dates/events were reportedly affected) or what might be considered as leading to their identification. I was told merely that the entirety of my own evidence would be heard in secret, behind closed doors, without any observers or reporters allowed.

Chillingly, I was also instructed that this meant I would not be allowed to talk about the fact I was a witness in the case, let alone write about it; even my gender must be disguised.

Did a disciplinary tribunal for a professional body I don’t belong to possess such draconian powers against me I wondered?  What about the right of the press to report quasi-judicial proceedings?  What if I outed myself by mistake and what could be done to me if I did?

Lawyers who have threatened me with ‘contempt’ have not hesitated to mention the words ‘fines’ and ‘jail’; would this be an example of contempt? I felt intimidated and worried about what this new level of secrecy means for the right of the press to report judicial proceedings.

My research soon informed me that I was caught in a ‘grey area’. Unlike a court of law, the SDT has no ‘powers of contempt’, but implies it could refer you to a court if disobedience can be shown to disrupt their work.

The SDT has been increasingly relying on secrecy and redactions to make it easier to use ‘privileged information’ to decide their cases (mainly emails between lawyers and their clients). However, many are concerned at the encroachment on civil rights and restrictions on reporting by an over-zealous response to AI and other information tools.

One lawyer, Tim Bullimore, has become a frustrated voice in pointing out that the SDT appears to be exceeding its powers if it is making orders which purport to affect the rights and freedoms of the public and the press. Rulings such as this only have the power of a withholding order, he argues, meaning that the SDT itself and those subject to it can’t release specified names but journalists who know them or find out cannot be gagged. He points out that it is absurd to suggest the public and press are bound by unpublished orders issued without notice or consultation by the SDT.

Court reporters had also protested at the prospect of being shut out during my evidence.  The situation was galling. I have no wish for my complaint to be kept secret and nothing to hide; I had already waived my own privilege given I had gone to the effort of making this complaint because of the very real public concern about abusive tactics against journalists.

As a result of my exposure of various frauds involving a web of politicians and businessmen, I have become an unwilling expert on the topic of so-called SLAPP suits (Strategic Litigation Against Public Participation), having been aggressively and abusively threatened by numerous defamation/’reputation management’ firms in the UK (dubbed the ‘libel capital of the world’).

It is not just freelance journalists, but major newsrooms and regulators themselves who are being routinely silenced by such threats made by a handful of law firms who earn millions out of a select group of super-rich clientele who thereby escape accountability.

These have included notorious Russian oligarchs, the head of the Wagner Group (while he was claiming not to be), multiple fraudsters and shady power-brokers across the globe. They bring their cases here to Britain, often to bully journalists who are not even living or writing in this country.

I am not going to reveal anything about the background to the complaint I made against Hamlins, beyond information which has been published by the SDT itself.  In short, one of the people mentioned in a series of articles said that they were defamatory. I settled, thereby avoiding costs.

I later published a book, which the claimant would allege put me in breach of the settlement.  My solicitor and I believed that the claimant’s solicitor (Mr Hutchings of Hamlins) made untrue claims and inappropriate threats in the course of making these allegations.  That was reported to the SRA, which led to the proceedings against Mr Hutchings in the SDT.

What was at issue before the Tribunal were the steps Hamlins took after the settlement I’d previously agreed to. I was accused of breaching the terms of that settlement (and thus of being in contempt of court) for an apparent ulterior motive. Hamlins wanted to obtain copyright to my relevant articles, so that they could then get copies of those articles taken down in the United States.

It was no secret to Hamlins when they took on these new proceedings that, though they were acting for an individual, their fees were being paid by a notorious entity. The company that employed their client and was footing their bills had long been identified by the US Department of Justice as a key party to a fraud I’d exposed. The company’s shareholder and a director have subsequently been sentenced to years in prison.

However, in a case which completed its journey through the SDT just before mine, another law firm, Carter Ruck, was exonerated for taking up cudgels on behalf of the notorious conwoman, Ruja Ignatova (the ‘Bitcoin Queen’) against members of the public – and even against regulators who had warned against her activities. The Financial Conduct Authority and the City of London police had posted warnings against Ignatova’s One Coin scam, but Carter Ruck had threatened them into taking them down and likewise gone after victims who had sought to alert others online about losing their life savings.

As the lawyer and tax camapigner Dan Neidle has pointed out, thanks to the warnings being removed, Ignatova was able to steal many more millions before vanishing. Yet the SDT has reasoned that the law firm was not aware of her fraudulent operation and so could not be sanctioned for acting for a client now known to be crooked (despite the open warnings of the regulator and law enforcers).

If important public watchdogs and authorities can be persuaded to withdraw warnings by reputation lawyers, which in turn can expect to be absolved of any misconduct by their own regulatory tribunal, what chance did I have?

Indeed, the SDT would proceed to rule in my case as well that the disparity of resources between a freelance journalist and a fraudulent enterprise who had stolen hundreds of millions should not be a consideration in its adjudication; Hamlins were not responsible for who was funding their client.

Pre-Publicity vs Post-Publicity

I was invited to speak with the SRA’s legal team to make sense of the SDT’s secrecy regime. It was explained to me that one reason for that regime was that ‘the cat was not yet out of the bag’ about who the parties were to this case: meaning that if the identity of Hamlins’ client had already been in news then the SDT would have judged it impossible to protect them, so tough they wouldn’t bother.

That had been the situation, for example, a month or so before when the ex-Chancellor Nadhim Zahawi’s solicitor faced proceedings in the SDT for making undue threats to the writer Dan Needle and there was no secrecy order made because everyone already knew the story and the names.

However, Hamlins’ client was now said to be out of the public eye. Thus, it seems, are rights and wrongs decided; consistency is not the issue.

Jigsaw Identification

However, the main reason I was ordered to be anonymised, as Mr Hutchings’ barrister articulated during the case management hearing to which I was not invited, was Hamlins’ concern that their client (Client A), who was not being prosecuted by the SRA, should be entitled to preserve the anonymity and not become known through ‘jigsaw identification’.

According to the Law Society Gazette, “Ben Hubble KC, for Hutchings, argued jigsaw identification could cause ‘prejudice’ to Client A, because Client B [me] had made a ‘false and defamatory’ allegation against him.”

The SRA’s own barrister had separately argued identification would undermine ‘Client A’s’ privilege (which they had not waived), and therefore conceded on my behalf that I should become anonymised – without consulting me – to make it harder to work out who Client A was.

The theory of jigsaw identification has become a popular concept in the age of AI. Once I was identified, the logic goes, then an enterprising journalist or member of the public could cross reference court records and news reports to identify Hutchings’ client.

In fact, to work out Client A’s identity simply from knowing my name is hard to say the least and takes specialist knowledge of the court system and record databases. Moreover, given the issues from the settled dispute had little bearing on the case before the SDT, and Mr Hutchings was the only respondent to that case, the identity of Client A was largely irrelevant to journalists reporting on it.

There was another massive hole in these various arguments, which I could have pointed out had I been given a voice. This was the apparent false assumption that the agreement I had reached with Hamlins’ client had included a secrecy clause which such settlements so often do.  To the contrary, Hamlins had specifically demanded that the court order I signed should be kept open so that it could be shown to others they were seeking to persuade to take down secondary articles.

What the SDT had achieved, therefore, was to turn an open agreement into a secret agreement. It felt like a form of SLAPP, effected not by a lawyer but by a tribunal and without me getting a single say in the matter.

With considerable misgivings, I agreed to continue as a witness under these conditions in the vain hope that the efforts by the SRA to bring some accountability to the UK defamation business might prove successful through this case. As I saw it, the stakes for society in enabling reporters to hold the richest and most powerful to a degree of accountability could not be higher.

Yet, on Day One of the trial last October the entire secrecy construct fell apart after the key arguments were uploaded onto the SDT website. Arriving as the first witness I had been told to redact my name from the court register, to hide myself away and not to talk to people in the corridor: generally to keep as low key as possible so that any journalists floating around wouldn’t clock me.

Just after midday, I nonetheless received an email from The Times newspaper.  The paper was following the case and understood that the anonymised journalist who had brought the complaint was me. This was “a significant case in the attempt to crackdown on Slapps” so would I agree to speak to their chief reporter?

There were many ways the The Times could have discovered my identity and may well have known it for some time. However, it would soon become clear that, completely separately, other third parties had meanwhile identified Hamlins’ client as well.

The same afternoon Tim Bullimore wrote to the SDT to warn them that Mr Hutchings’ main argument – published by the SDT itself – gave away Client A’s identity by quoting from a reported court judgment.  It was not the revealing of my identity that gave the game away, but the paperwork which appeared on the SDT’s own website!

Not wanting to derail the proceedings, I simply did not reply to The Times. However, it was obvious that the cat was most certainly now out of the bag, just as it had been in the Zahawi case a few weeks before. What was the point of keeping me secret when the Times had published my name and Client A could be easily identified from the papers published by the SDT?

By the end of the day The Times had published their story with a striking lead focused on the personalities involved:

The Duke of Sussex’s solicitor attempted to “blackmail” Gordon Brown’s sister-in-law with a threat which could have sent her to jail, a disciplinary tribunal has heard.
Christopher Hutchings, one of the country’s leading “reputation management” lawyers with a string of celebrity clients, is accused of acting dishonestly.

Transparency had prevailed after all and the inconsistencies were over; or so I thought. Hamlins’ client was not named by The Times, thereby preserving the intent of the order to the same degree as the Tribunal itself had done.

Nonetheless, far from giving up on the matter, I learned the SDT entered into a raging war of attrition with The Times. They wanted the article taken down; immediately.

The Times apparently asserted their own opinion that the SDT had no authority to make such demands and nor to issue reporting restrictions. While the battle continued into the night the article remained online for several hours.

In the end, The Times, for reasons I do not know, decided to comply with the Tribunal and removed the article from their website ‘without prejudice’. This, despite having described the case “as an important test of attempts by the legal regulators to crack down on so-called Slapps … defined as “a misuse of the legal system through bringing or threatening claims that are unmeritorious or characterised by abusive tactics, in order to stifle lawful scrutiny and publication”.

Empowered by this triumph, the Tribunal rather than accepting the cat out of the bag theory, attempted instead to thrust the genie back into the bottle. It ordered that further unprecedented levels of secrecy should be ordered over the remaining proceedings.

Under their revised ruling, the entire hearing would be held secretly behind closed doors with no reporters or members of the public allowed to attend at any stage whatsoever. Neither would I as the first witness be allowed to listen to the remainder of the proceedings or hear the other witnesses, as would normally be allowed. The observers who had been following the case were kicked out and the online feed went blank.

Even the SRA was moved to lodge an official letter expressing its concern at this crossing of a major new boundary against transparency. By now, it was clear to me that the case wasn’t making the situation better it was making it worse.

The nub of my complaint against Mr Hutchings is laid out in the documents published by the SDT. (links to those documents appear at the end of this article, so that both sides of the story can be seen).  Having agreed to sign a settlement to remove coverage of Hamlins’ client, I found myself re-approached by the law firm some months later alleging I had broken the settlement by an indirect reference in a book (which my lawyers refute).

The SRA’s case against Mr Hutchings was that he was trying to use the leverage of this threat of contempt proceedings against me with a different objective entirely. It was in order to get me to surrender my copyright over articles he wanted third parties to take off the internet in the United States. In the light of America’s press freedom laws some sites had refused to remove those articles, whereas copyright law give considerable powers of enforcement.

As the SRA put it, the threat made included a suggestion by Mr Hutchings that I was “liable, amongst other things, to be committed to prison for contempt. The threat was, therefore, one with very serious consequences”.

After what appears to have been considerable planning (including the writing of a script) Hutchings and a colleague had made what might be described as an ambush call to my solicitor. During the call they implied they had just read my book and that a top legal counsel had confirmed that its contents gave them a ‘strong case‘ to sue me for contempt, on the basis that it allegedly broke the settlement with their client (the actual phrase the counsel used was ‘a reasonably arguable case’).

Threatening “criminal sanctions“, like jail, they offered me “a way out” of the situation.  They would be willing to turn a blind eye to the alleged breaches in the book if I surrendered them my copyright over the earlier articles so they could force the recalcitrant US sites to take down the remaining posts under copyright law.

The SRA’s case was that the relevant correspondence showed that neither Mr Hutchings nor his client had any intention of carrying out the threat to litigate over the book. Mr Hutchings had, for example, told his client he was asking for the Counsel’s opinion only “on the basis we are aiming to set out a “credible threat” as you have rightly put it, to forcefully apply pressure on [Sarawak Report] to take steps to assist you more broadly, and you have no intention to pursue a full legal complaint for the potential contempt.”
He later reiterated ” I will stress that the strategy is to put forward a plausible threat with a view to engaging in discussions with [Sarawak Report’s lawyer] to seek an agreed remedy”

Mr Hutchings’ client (‘Client A’) in turn would emphasise several times they had no interest in taking legal steps to activate Hamlins’ exaggerated ‘strong claim’. For example: “There is no point litigating this, so the question is whether the threat is sufficiently credible and the threat sufficiently real, for [Sarawak Report’s lawyer] to advise offering up the [copyright] license to make it go away”.

Hutchings again responded “we are aiming to set out a “credible threat” as you have rightly put it, to forcefully apply pressure on [Sarawak Report] to take steps to assist you more broadly, and you have no intention to pursue a full legal complaint for the potential contempt.”

After that exchange, Hutchings wrote to his expert counsel: “ Client A’s underlying objective is to put [Sarawak Report] under sufficient pressure so as to obtain a license to copyright in [Sarawak Report] articles, which would facilitate our take-down requests for online content providers….. [Client A] wants to proceed with the threat on the basis [Client A] does not intend to litigate this but to apply pressure on [Sarawak Report] to take action… It is important of course that it is as compelling as it can be, to exert maximum pressure on [Sarawak Report]”

In response to this the counsel had replied by issuing a stark warning that what was being contemplated appeared tantamount to a criminal offence.  “[Client A] does not want to litigate for contempt ... The letter cannot be seen to be offering a ticket out – there can be no possibility at all of it appearing as blackmail, or contempt proceedings will be thrown out. Further, there is no collateral gain, only [Client B/Sarawak Report Editor] being imprisoned….”.

Despite this warning by their own counsel against saying or doing anything which might look like blackmail, the first thing my lawyer informed me having received Hutching’s call was that it was clear Hamlins were indeed attempting to blackmail me. On the one hand they had threatened they could land me in prison and with a heavy fine over the alleged breaches in my book, on the other they were offering a “pragmatic proposal” to drop their claim if I surrendered up my copyright.

No wonder, I thought, that the lawyers had decided on a phone call rather than the original plan of sending me a letter. However, in a follow up email, after I had emphatically rejected their suggestion as improper, Hutchings also put it in writing.

His email threatened that if I did not ‘reconsider my position’ and comply with his “pragmatic proposal” within seven days, he would sue me for a breach of a court ordered settlement which would carry ‘criminal sanctions’, including “the likelihood of an order being made for the Book to be pulped, [me] being fined and/or [me] being committed to prison for contempt.”

Later, Hamlins denied to the Tribunal that they had implied any quid pro quo in either the phone call or that email and claimed they were merely threatening legal action over my alleged breach of the settlement. In that case, I wondered, what was the “pragmatic proposal” they were asking me to “reconsider” that would avoid the pulping of my book and me being “committed to prison“?

If Hamlins were solely looking for the removal of alleged offending words how else could I solve their problem other than by pulping the book? They never said. Yet, in that same email, while seeking to deny their copyright objective, Hamlins also took the trouble to mention that in their legal opinion giving them my copyright fitted in with the order I had signed. There were no other suggestions for the ‘way out’ they had in mind.

If there remained any doubts about the intention of the call I believed these would be dispelled by further evidence produced by the SRA showing the Hamlins team had worked on a series of advance preparation notes entitled “Script for Call With [Sarawak Report’s solicitor]”. These notes were revised several times as the lawyers honed their pitch.

First, they framed how to make their allegation under the heading “Contempt of Court” – our client has been advised in clear terms that the serious breach amounts to basis to bring contempt proceedings. Your client should treat this seriously.”

Then, they crafted their follow up remarks under the heading “Way out – If your client will give an exclusive licence of copyright in the original unedited articles solely for the purpose of allowing A to have passages taken down by resistant platforms A may be prepared to forgo A’s right to go back to Court….. If option one is not accepted, left with only alternative, which A instructs me A will pursue, to bring contempt”

That script for the phone call might seem entirely consistent with the original plan warned against by counsel, as the SRA plainly thought. However, Hutchings would claim to the Tribunal that this script did not amount to a quid pro quo as argued by the regulator. The Tribunal would agree with him; at the end of the secret hearing it announced that it was dismissing the SRA’s allegations.

At the time I had rejected what I viewed to be a blatant blackmail attempt and decided to call Hamlin’s bluff. Sure enough, after I further rejected the follow-up email calling it criminal behaviour, the law firm backed off, in line with its client’s refusal to move beyond threats.

That established, I later reported the law firm to the SRA.

Tribunal Exonerates Hutchings On All Fronts 

If this was a strange backdrop to the secret hearing it soon felt even stranger to find myself questioned by a small group of self-regulating lawyers with no outside observer allowed to take note of what was said.

The line of questioning also seemed strange. Although Mr Hutchings was denying that he sought to bully me into surrendering copyright, I found myself challenged for being unreasonable in not having done just that.

Shouldn’t I have given in to the demand that was not made, asked his KC?

It was now being argued that it should have been perfectly acceptable for me to let Hamlins use copyright law to navigate US press freedom laws in order to get websites and a hosting company called WordPress to take down articles in the United States.

I thanked the KC for admitting that this was indeed the purpose of making contempt allegations against me, including threats of prison. However, there were no reporters or observers present to report the interchange or apparent contradictions.

The KC then claimed I had worked in cahoots with the management of the US hosting site WordPress. I explained I knew no one from WordPress. The barrister then produced an old email where I said I was glad I still had draft copies of my removed articles stored on the WordPress content creation tool (a separate service entirely) in my computer. This he alleged was evidence that I was indeed conspiring with the management of WordPress to frustrate their client!

Any blogger can download WordPress to create their content. The panel looked bemused, yet, it was the libel lawyers who were to be acquitted on each and every count.

Ruling right after the hearing came to a close the panel concluded it was not satisfied that Hamlins had tried to make improper threats or blackmail me, let alone employ an untruth by misrepresenting a legal opinion they’d received.

Indeed, if Hutchings had done that during his call with my solicitor, he testified it was merely “a slip of the tongue“.

In what might appear to be a contradiction, the SDT also agreed with another secret witness, a famous libel lawyer, who agreed with Hamlins’ KC that even if the quid quo pro was mentioned using copyright law to get round US freedom of speech protections was in their view a “permissible objective” for Hamlins to hold on behalf of their client.

So, Mr Hutchings was exonerated of the regulator’s charges of dishonesty and making improper demands, and the libel industry’s controversial tactics against the press were upheld.

Notably, the SDT did not award costs to Hamlins; was this a gentle nudge that defamation lawyers should ‘tone it down’?

If so that message was not received. The following day, one champion of the libel industry published another article in the Law Society Gazette. This time it was an excoriating denunciation of the SRA for its attempts to bring the UK’s reputation launderers to heel. These attempts must now stop thundered the libel lawyer.

Heavy lobbying of the Ministry of Justice is now further reported to have successfully persuaded the Labour government to drop anti-SLAPP legislation previously drafted then also abandoned by the Conservatives when they dissolved parliament before the last election. This week over 50 Labour MPs signed a petition to restore the pledge.

Until such time, well-heeled defamation lawyers can celebrate that their trade remains relatively unhindered in protecting the super-rich from unwanted comment.

Meanwhile, in the absence of affordable justice in this sphere, the right to a reputation remains an inaccessible expense for ordinary folk (including mere celebrities and politicians) whose pockets are simply not deep enough to engage the £1,000 an hour lawyers who prowl the Royal Courts of Justice.

And what about myself? I had made a complaint in good faith in order to highlight concerns about the tactics used to silence journalists and ironically exited the process under harsh instructions to remain anonymous and keep schtum.

When I asked what right it might have to gag me, the STC last week told me their ‘orders remain in force and are binding‘ but failed to cite under what authority or with what enforceability:

The Tribunal made orders regarding the anonymity of certain individuals, of whom you were one. Those orders remain in force and are binding. While you indicate that you do not propose to name other anonymised individuals, it may be that identifying yourself publicly in connection with the case could have the effect of identifying matters or individuals whose anonymity the Tribunal ordered should be preserved. [Clerk to SDT]

The same day the Tribunal published a whole new set of policies, without notice or consultation, re-asserting their right to issue reporting restrictions and sanction those who don’t comply, again giving no clear source for their authority.

Can this really be the case in modern democratic Britain?  I now think not. Senior lawyers tell me they believe the SDT has been exceeding its powers.  One High Court judge reprimanded the SDT in 2022 for the “creeping march of anonymity and redaction” in a different case, saying “sweeping anonymity orders in respect of the third parties ought not to have been made. Courts and tribunals should not be squeamish about naming innocent people caught up in alleged wrongdoing of others. It is part of the price of open justice and there is no presumption that their privacy is more important than open justice.”

That view can only be hardened by an even more recent court judgement which overturned a separate order made by the Tribunal where the judge said “What [a journalist] did and did not have a (legal) right to publish is, in the end … not [a question] on which the Tribunal was competent to give a definitive ruling.”

Therefore, The Times newspaper may have backed down but I have decided not to.

If it is found the SDT have not exceeded their legislated powers and that it is I who have exceeded my rights to freedom of expression and to report in the public interest, then I am resigned to pay the price.

Key Case documents from SDT Website:
https://solicitorstribunal.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/F-redacted-rule-12-statement-CH.pdf
https://solicitorstribunal.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/F-reply-CH.pdf
https://solicitorstribunal.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/REDACTED-SRA-v-CH-Skeleton-Argument_redacted.pdf
https://solicitorstribunal.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/F-respondents-skeleton-argument-for-the-substantive-CH.pdf

An upside may be the slap in the face for pricey ‘Slapp’ lawyers who specialise in defamation threats, given that online copyright fraud has become a cheap alternative to their services.

However, this easy route to silencing public interest journalism by issuing bogus copyright complaints to online search engines, such as Google, has become a major tool for fraudsters to cover-up misdeeds.

The reason for the effectiveness of this deceptive practice is that the unregulated US tech giants invest so little in consumer relations or accountability.

The sense of impunity is such that these trillion dollar companies, which earn billions and billions of dollars of annual revenue from controlling communications across the globe, show zero interest in dispensing any of their profits into a workforce to deal with justified complaints. They see no need to invest in such requirements.

It is a matter that is finally reaching a level of global concern as the consequences have started to bite in other directions, resulting in court cases like the one now facing Facebook about its alleged ruination of children’s lives.

Rather than serve their customers or listen to public concerns these companies are ploughing vast sums into the political campaigns of legislators in the United States to make sure their host nation continues to leave them immune from the laws that govern lesser entities like mere publishers, news organisations let alone journalists, professionals or individuals of any kind.

These include the laws of defamation and also copyright. Back in 2015/16 Sarawak Report experienced a deluge of Malaysian government commissioned vilification and defamation that was promoted via anonymous websites and Facebook sites hosted by what is now Meta and also Google. Two of the major PR firms responsible have been identified as Bell Pottinger and FBC Media, both now closed thanks to this and related scandals.

However, the tech giants simply walked away from responsibility having been exempted in their capacity as mere ‘platforms”.  Sarawak Report engaged Facebook senior officials pointing out that the posts defaming the site for reporting on 1MDB had been ‘boosted’ by the site to reach millions of extra readers in return for extra payments made by those PR companies.

They were therefore no longer acting as mere platforms, we argued, they were acting as publishers with far more reach than any mainstream media or book-seller.  Facebook, who are almost impossible to gain proper contact details for, simply did not bother to respond Sarawak Report’s complaints, NGOs, press enquiries or lawyers’ letters.

Likewise, Google which has set up a totally AI-driven public interface operation, is leaving complainants to flounder in circular discussions with artificial bots that simply refer them to ‘FAQ’ web pages or to no-reply email addresses.

True to form, therefore, in response to US legislation that requires platforms to ‘take down’ material that infringes copyright, the company has installed an automated process that flagged up concerns from the very beginning as being blatantly open to abuse.

Specifically, the reliance on robots provides a wonderful opportunity for unscrupulous reputation laundering outfits to make bogus copyright complaints about articles their clients have not been able to silence any other way, for example via expensive legal threats.

Google’s cheapskate, staff-free solution to copyright complaints is to simply takedown the article, without even notifying the site complained about in the case of Sarawak Report. It is then left up to the victim of the fake complaint (the real owner of the copyright) to find out about the removal of their material and then to embark on a complex complaints process where the tech giant turns a deaf ear, leaving each party to sue the other.

Three years ago this happened to Sarawak Report when the now incarcerated Kuwaiti fraudster, Hammad Al Wazzan, who had been working as a proxy for Jho Low laundering stolen Malaysian funds, sought to remove an article about him from this site.

He had already tried legal threats and bogus writs through London libel law firms which Sarawak Report withstood at the expense of enormous stress and inconvenience. These hadn’t worked because the article was true and Al Wazzan, like others who have threatened this site, did not dare to actually go to court. He was later jailed by Kuwait for the crimes revealed by Sarawak Report.

In the meantime, an online site in India called Ground News issued a copyright complaint in May 2023 to Google claiming they had the rights to the article (not Sarawak Report whom Hamad had sued) even though their website simply copied the headline and then linked readers back to Sarawak Report to read the rest.

This was sufficient for Google to simply remove the Sarawak Report article from their search engine thereby achieving what Mr Wazzan had sought through his legal threats but doubtless for a fraction of the cost (libel lawyers should take note of the dire threat to their lucrative income stream). The article became largely inaccessible.

Google had failed to notify Sarawak Report. When Sarawak Report did find out there was no one to complain to. The sole solution offered by Google’s complex automated process was for Sarawak Report to submit an online ‘counter-complaint’ form which we did in August 2024.

The same automated process promises that if you submit a counter-claim and the originator of the complaint cannot prove to Google within 10 days that they have initiated legal action against the alleged offender, then the link to the article will be reinstated in the Google search engine.

Yet, although there had been no such legal action for copyright violation and SR repeated its complaints, there was no reinstatement carried out by Google throughout 2024 or 2025.

Again this year Sarawak Report re-initiated the complaints process with the same disappointing result. There was no takedown within 10 days, despite the repeat counterclaim and despite the lack of legal action or any effort by the complainant to demonstrate their claim for copyright over the article written by Sarawak Report.

In the meantime, Google had demonstrated its own impunity and exemption from such copyright laws with regard to its own AI engines by itself ignoring SR’s copyright.  If you search the topic of Al Wazzan and his fear of being made a fall guy, Google’s AI extensively uses the content of the same Sarawak Report article and even acknowledges the article was authored by this site.

Despite the acknowledgement and despite Google’s own use of our copyright, the ban on accessing the Sarawak Report original link to the article continued for three years with no replies being offered to numerous complaints.

Today, the article has finally been restored to the Google search engine.

It took enormous time and effort, including emails requesting comment to Google’s press office (which were received but not answered) plus threats to marshal widespread support before action was finally taken to address a complaint that one customer service employee could have resolved in a matter of minutes.

Google has now sent an automated no-reply notice acknowledging there was no response to their automated request for evidence from the bogus complainant.

All this, simply because Google is exempted from the laws it helps to apply against others thanks to their unlimited budget to lobby legislators in the United States and the company does not wish to spend any of the billions it takes from the global community to fund jobs that provide accountability to the societies it sucks profit from.

This level of impunity and power urgently needs to be addressed in the public interest as far worse consequences beckon.

Returning online after three years – you can read the article here:

I Fear They Want To Make Me The Fall Guy! Hamad Al Wazzan – EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW

As Tim Leissner finally began his sentence at the weekend for defrauding 1MDB, Sarawak Report’s probe into the settlements around his case has prompted extraordinary revelations about assets funded by stolen Malaysian money that appear to have escaped the DOJ’s net.

Our scrutiny of the records shows that the disappearing act began with a series of complex manoeuvres executed by the banker after he saw the writing on the wall with the fall of Najib government in May 2018. As investigations closed in on him he raced to hide his ownership by putting the holding company outside the jurisdiction of the US authorities.

Given that the DOJ appears to have allowed Leissner to more or less get away with these tactics as part of a generous settlement in return for his evidence and cooperation, these assets look set to remain in the ex-Goldman Sachs banker’s hands to enjoy after he completes his meagre two year sentence.

Case records go back to Leissner’s original arrest in the United States in July 2018. They show that after the ex-Goldman Sachs banker was charged he was required to post bail. He did so by agreeing to surrender $20 million worth of shares (at their current value) in the company Celsius, which he claimed to own through a company he controlled called Nu Horizons.

A US Department of Justice filing confirms that these shares had been purchased through cash purloined from 1MDB:

“The Celsius stock that was issued to Nu Horizons was obtained using proceeds from the 1MDB bond scheme.”
[DOJ vs Russell Simmonds Case 1:23-mc-01505-MKB Document 21 Filed 12/07/23]

However, it became clear in Leissner’s subsequent trial that weeks beforehand he had officially SOLD his interest in these very shares. He did so on May 10th, the day it became clear that Najib had lost the Malaysian GE13 election and that the game was up for the 1MDB conspirators.

The sale plainly represented a ‘Plan B’ that Leissner had kept on standby and put into immediate effect during those fateful hours as Najib’s power to protect his crooked collaborators evaporated.

According to Leissner’s later court confession as a witness in the Roger Ng trial, he transferred his entire interest in his company Midas Commodities, under which he held the Celsius shares and a number of other assets, including his Beverley Hills mansion bought for $25 million, for $170 million on that day.

The ‘purchaser’ was a company named Newland Limited, incorporated in Hong Kong under the name of a Qatari businessman called Ghanim Saad M Al Saad Al-Kuwari. This was how Leissner explained his actions:
Q: “And at some point, you were going to try and transfer assets out of Kimora’s name to Ghanim bin Saad?”
[Leissner]: “Ghanim Al Saad, yes…. it was just a holding company that was going to hold these assets that I was going to transfer into it.”
Q: “...including the Keyway Pride California which owned the $25 million Beverly Hills house, to Ghanim for $170 million?”
[Leissner] ” … essentially, yes”. [Transcript Leissner testimony Roger Ng trial].

The name of Ghanim Saad has emerged during previous dealings involving Leissner and the same source of  money that was later sent to Midas to purchase the various assets.

Ghanim Saad was the owner of the Century Banking Corporation in Mauritius, which Jho Low had attempted to buy in 2016 using a transfer of 156m euros from Al Mouniratyen, the Kuwaiti front company set up by the now imprisoned Sheikh Sabah Jaber Al-Mubarak, in 2017.

Sarawak Report was the first to expose how that money from Kuwait had been laundered by Jho Low into the Sheikh’s accounts from backhanders paid to Chinese construction companies in return for Najib’s inflation of the contract for the East Coast Railway Link.

Ghanim Saad, described by Liessner as ‘a business partner he had known for a few years’, was (perhaps not surprisingly) already part of Jho’s circle as the personal advisor to one of the members of 1MDB’s so-called Advisory Board, Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber Al Thani. (The Advisory Board never actually met).

The Century bank deal fell through because the Mauritian regulators rejected the money as being suspicious.  Subsequently, Al Mouniratyen instead sent 145 million euros to Leissner’s own company Midas Commodities, some $49 million of which he used to help Jho Low pay pressing 1MDB debt repayments, but most of which he put into his own pocket to buy the above cited Beverley Hills mansion, a $15 million yacht, shares in his wife’s Baby Phat clothing brand and 3.9 million Celsius shares for $3 million. Those shares then proceeded to rocket in value.

Later, Sarawak Report detailed how the cash from Al Mouniratyen was stolen from Malaysia.  Further funds had been funnelled from bogus pipe line contracts set up by Najib in Malaysia in 2017. RM8.3 billion (about US$2 billion) was paid upfront to the Chinese contractor CPPB, representing 88% of the total value of the project, even though only 13% of the work was ever done.

Tim Leissner has admitted that all the cash he obtained from Al Mouniratyen into Midas was most likely Malaysian loot, although he has attempted to also suggest that the nominal owner of Al Mouniratyen, the jailed Sheikh Sabah who ‘lent’ Midas the €145 million, is somehow the person to whom he owes the money, rather than Malaysia. This was how he answered questioning by Roger Ng’s lawyer in March 2023:

Q: And your suspicion is that that house in Beverly Hills was Low’s money?
[Leissner]: Yes.
Q: Because you had no reason to think that Sheikh Sabah would give you a dime, do you?
A: Yes. There was no other business contact with him.
Q: And the FBI and the Department of Justice, they let you live in that mansion after your arrest, right?
A: Yes, I lived there.
Q: They let you keep the mansion, right?
A: They haven’t forfeited that mansion.
Q: They didn’t forfeit it, right? As you sit here today, it’s still not forfeited, right?
A: That’s correct……..By the way, that money is to be repaid is my understanding
Q: To be repaid to who and when?
A: The agree — well, to the sheikh.
Q To the sheikh?  So you think the sheikh is waiting on this money from you?
A: There was an arbitration request for that money yes….
Q: Do you have any intention to pay the Sheikh that money?
A: It can only be done when those assets are sold and two as the resolution worked with my lawyers with any of these matters I talked about here….”

Following the conviction of Roger Ng, Leissner agreed to pay a $43 million fine for his part in the crime.  It appears that this was deducted from the ensuing sale of the Celsius shares by the DOJ following his conviction in November 2025.

But, what do these transfers tell us about the real ownership of the other assets under Midas, including the $25 million mansion in Beverley Hills that Leissner had continued to live in as of 2023?

Mysterious Share Transfer Raises Questions

The mysterious changes of ownership of the Celsius shares lie at the heart of the questions over Leissner’s stolen cash and concerns that Malaysia’s interests are being sidelined in favour of an indulgent settlement for a devious whistleblower, who only sang after being arrested.

The pre-trial release bond for Leissner was set by a New York Judge on June 14, 2018 for the amount of $20,000,000, to be secured by 3,972,659 shares of Celsius stock that was claimed at the time to be held at JP Morgan Chase Bank account in the name of Leissner’s wife Kimora Lee Simmonds.

This bearing in mind that all of Leissner’s assets, including these shares which had previously been held by Midas, had been registered as ‘sold’ to Newland the month before.

Yet, it seems the circle was eventually squared regarding the phantom bail bond. Kimora Lee Simmons would later state in her own court testimony, during later squabbles over who was due what, that “On July 11, 2018, 3,972,659 shares of Celsius stock were transferred to Lee’s personal brokerage account from Nu Horizons.“.

This means that in order to meet the requirement of Leissner’s agreed bailout, the shares that had been “sold” in May to Ghanam Saad’s company Newland were somehow then transferred on to Kimora’s JP Morgan account.

The DOJ would later seize 3,370,787 of those shares from the JP Morgan account March 2021 to make the forfeiture. By that time those shares were estimated as being worth over $330 million.

Are we really expected to believe that the Qatari who had supposedly purchased them (and the ownership of the Beverley Hills house and all Leissner’s other assets) for $170 million in May 2018 had surrendered them back to Kimora a couple of months later to make bail bond for Leissner?

Leissner’s testimony at the Roger Ng trial in 2022 gives an insight into what really seems to have happened, which is that the ‘sale’ to Leissner’s business pal was more a game of smoke and mirrors to attempt to further disguise his stolen assets and move the alleged ownership into an off-shore haven famous for its ‘banking secrecy’.

Under questioning he admitted he had merely transferred the ownership of his mansion and other assets from the name of his former wife to Ghanam. He had lied about this during his first interviews with the FBI but had finally cracked and admitted it during his 9th interrogation.

Indeed, the very fact he had been able to transfer the shares from the company he had ‘sold’ them to back to the ‘ownership’ of his wife in order to post his bail, was the clearest possible sign he continued to control the shares.

Likewise, Leissner admitted that while the nominal sale of the company had been cited as $170 million, the cash would only be realised once all these assets (the shares, house, yacht) were sold:

“The assets were in the United States so the assets don’t move. The ownership was transferred offshore or the intention was that the ownership was being transferred offshore. The assets themselves stay where they are”, Leissner told the court in his testimony against Roger Ng.

He went on to admit that he and his then wife Kimora had travelled to Lichtenstein after the ‘sale’ in May to look for a good location “to hold the consideration” from that purchase (in other words to disguise the continuing hidden ownership), given Lichtenstein has “a very sound system of bank secrecy”, as Leissner put it, before returning to the United States and his arrest.

Further questioning effectively confirmed that it was the ownership of the assets rather than cash that was being lodged in the Lichtenstein bank by the visiting couple, with a view to selling them later, rather than the proceeds from a genuine earlier sale of Midas:
Q “And where was that money at the moment? In other words when you and Kimora went to Liechtenstein, where was the money?
[Leissner]  It was still in the assets that we talked about transferring or selling to Newland. So the money was nowhere. It was only the assets.” (pg 2308, transcript Roger Ng trial).

This means that a considerable trove of assets purchased with money stolen from 1MDB, including the $25 million Beverley Hills mansion currently occupied by Kimora Lee Simmonds should actually be returned to 1MDB, along with the proceeds of the eventual sale of the seized Celsius shares.

However, this is where the disappointment sets in for Malaysia.  By the time the actual sale took place following Leissner’s eventual conviction in November 2025, the Celsius shares had fallen in value and netted only an estimated $190 million (from a peak of over $400 million at the time he surrendered them).

Minus the forfeiture, and some of the shares which Kimora and her ex-husband are claiming they bought themselves (a settlement of this dispute with the DOJ seems imminent), around $100 million ought to be remaining.

That money ought at least be returned to Malaysia.  However, Sarawak Report has learned that there has been no discussion so far about sending back the cash to KL.

Even more depressing has been the apparent failure by the DOJ so far to include any further demands on the rest of the Midas stolen assets as part of Leissner’s agreement to cooperate: an agreement he had early on sought to cheat on by lying about the Newland ‘sale’.

To the contrary, it seems Leissner has been rewarded for his lies because the DOJ has continued to treat these assets as if they were outside the case.

Beverley Hills mansion ‘sale’ that went to court

The mansion at 25 Beverley Park Circle in Beverley Hills is the most glaring example. Bought by Leissner and his then (bigamously married) spouse, the ex-model Kimora Lee Simmonds with stolen 1MDB cash in 2017 for $27 million, it is plainly an asset that ought to be confiscated with the value returning to Malaysia.

However, Leissner appears to have embarked on staggeringly devious manoeuvres to put the property (or at least its value) out of the way of confiscation – to the extent that it is now the subject of an ongoing raging ownership battle dragging through the courts.

It is a dispute that has connected Leissner to some extremely interesting names indeed, connected to 1MDB’s crooked partners in the Middle East. These include, Amanda Staveley, the former close confidante of Khadem al Qubaisi and her separate billionaire business partners the Reuben brothers for whose son Jamie she brokered the purchase of a share of Newcastle United.

The extent to which Leissner’s ex-wife Kimora Lee Simmonds collaborated in the deceit is open to claims and counter-claims pending trial. However, on the basis of having allegedly been defrauded by her ex-husband, Staveley and the Reubens, Lee Simmonds (purportedly a multi-millionaires businesswoman in her own right) has continued to live for free in the sprawling Beverley Hills Mansion …. apparently deaf to the irony that it really belongs to the people of Malaysia.

The saga detailed in the court papers is as follows. After the couple flew to Lichtenstein to conduct the bogus sale of their assets to Ghanam Saad, followed by Tim Leissner’s arrest in June 2018, they borrowed a huge sum of $12 million against the value of the mansion they had supposedly transferred to the Qatari businessman.

As the judge in the case has pointed out, “Leissner admitted to efforts to move and hide assets, including ownership of his entities like Keyway [the holding company for the property], out of apparent concern the U.S. government would seek to disgorge the Property as restitution.” (Roger Ng case).

Lee Simmonds’ own depositions appear to confirm that she was aware and consented to this first transaction to raise money out of the value of the house.

Coming to the rescue to broker the deal was none other than the businesswoman Amanda Staveley, former friend of the by then imprisoned al Qubaisi and recognised as being also close to his former boss Sheikh Mansour, Chairman of IPIC/Aabar and brother of the Crown Prince (now President) of the UAE, Mohammed bin Zayed al Nahyen (MBZ).

The connection to the 1MDB network is therefore clear.  Indeed, Najib is on record threatening MBZ that his brother was highly exposed by the scandal, not least because he had received $160 million towards his yacht out of the half billion dollars received by al Qubaisi in kickbacks from Jho Low.

Staveley had prevailed on her contacts, the Reuben brothers, to stump up the $12 million loan, which they provided through one of their companies, Koronus Holdings.

Why these top businessmen would agree to offer a loan on a controversially acquired property to a charged fraudster begs several questions.  Perhaps they were helping out their network of Middle Eastern contacts by taking some of the pressure off the Goldman banker who knew so much?

The Leissners were supposed to pay interest on this loan taken out in July 2018; however, it appears they never did. By the following year an embarrassed Amanda Staveley apparently ended up paying what was due out of her own pocket through an amendment to the terms of the loan.

By late 2020 with over two million dollars by then outstanding and still no payments from Keyway Pride (under which the couple still claimed title to the house), a new arrangement was arrived at whereby Leissner signed off on a sale of the property to another company owned by the the Reubens named 25 Beverley Hills Circle Propco LLC [Propco] for a hugely diminished $15 million (minus the money outstanding to Staveley who made sure she got paid off in the process).

Leissner then signed a separate contract whereby he agreed on behalf of the same Keyway Pride company that had sold the property (itself 100% owned by Midas which he plainly still controlled) to rent back the property for the princely sum of $67,000 a month.

These payments were due to begin in May 2021 under the terms of the contract.  However, true to earlier form, the by now apparently warring couple never paid a bean. Indeed, by January Kimora had filed a legal action against her husband, Staveley and the Reubens brothers for having allegedly conducted the sale and leaseback arrangements behind her back. That case has been raging through the civil courts ever since that date.

The legal arguments have been waged around whether Leissner had the right to sign off the house from the supposedly jointly owned Keyway Pride without Kimora’s consent. Her lawyers have claimed he forged a document to give Propco (the Reubens) and Staveley’s legal teams the excuse to say they understood he had the right to sign off a sale on his sole signature.

The plaintiffs have provided convincing evidence of such doctoring and the crook Goldman banker is known to have had previous form. After all, he has admitted to twice forging divorce papers in order to convince two successive would-be brides that he was a free man: he did it to Kimora and to his previous wife.

If the Reubens and Staveley fell for this, Kimora’s argument is they were at the very least negligent, which is her excuse for staying on in the mansion without paying one dollar for the privilege … whilst her husband has apparently vanished the total of $27 million… the original cost of the property when they bought it with Malaysian money in 2017.

The couple have therefore effectively invited Malaysia and the DOJ to fight it out with the Reuben brothers as to who owns the right to realise the value of the estate, whilst Kimora lives it up in style on the back of Malaysian loot.

As for her estranged spouse, as one analyst has concluded that given such tactics Leissner looks set to be sitting pretty after, at worst, two years’ detention in a low security faculty (he is still hopeful of a pardon):

“As a German national, Leissner will be deported from the US after serving his sentence and will be able to live a comfortable life with many 10’s  of millions of dollars he stole from the Malaysian tax payers”.

On 27th October 2015 Jeffrey Epstein arranged an urgent late night call with Cynthia Tobiano, the right hand deputy to the President of Edmond de Rothschild bank, Ariane de Rothschild, who was copied into the email exchange.

Epstein had added a link to his email message to the two female bankers flagging an article by the now redundant Malaysian Insider citing new revelations just published on Sarawak Report about “RM1.8 billion ringgit” passed through Jho Low accounts. It was among several follow ups of an expose produced by this site earlier in April.

The messages have come to light as part of the recent massive data dump from the Epstein files.  The Sarawak Report article that had caught Epstein’s attention as being relevant to the Edmund de Rothschild bankers detailed investigations in Singapore revealing that Jho had transferred over $500 million dollars of the $700 million stolen from the 2009 1MDB ‘Joint Venture’ from his Good Star bank account in RBS Coutts Zurich to his ADKMIC bank accounts in BSI Singapore.

It was clearly of significance to those in the email trail and needed no further comment. The issues were ‘complex’ Epstein warned and he wanted to speak to the bankers late that night their time.  “When you want’, Cynthia Tobaino had said:

This and other emails reveal just how close Epstein was to the banking players entangled with Jho Low and the growing panic in their ranks as Sarawak Report and official investigators closed in on their dealings with the politically exposed Malaysian fraudster.

Sarawak Report had initially revealed the dangerous information that the Chairman of the Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund Aabar, Khadam al Qubaisi, had also received a $20 million dollar payment from the same Good Star account owned by Jho Low into his personal Vasco Trust account at Ariane de Rothschild’s bank in Luxembourg.

The information came from bank statements passed us by a whistleblower. It signalled that big bribes were passing to the head of the IPIC subsidiary which had entered into a peculiar form of partnership with 1MDB to guarantee its bond issues.

That article had triggered a crisis both in Abu Dhabi and, as is revealed by the emails, within the bank. Sarawak Report would soon establish far more money was transferred once a second company, Blackstone Southeast Asia Real Estate Partners, was also identified as belonging to Jho Low. Vasco trust statements reveal that in total half a billion dollars had been sent by Jho Low to al Qubasi’s personal account.

Shortly after that very first article, Khadem al Qubaisi was sacked by Aabar/IPIC as Sarawak Report continued to reveal the fund’s role at the heart of the scandal surrounding 1MDB’s second round of thefts from the three bond issues by Goldman Sachs totalling $6.5 billion (over half the money was spirited away through bogus subsidiaries of Aabar organised by Al Qubaisi).

It later emerged that Edmond de Rothschild’s star client was in jail in Abu Dhabi. By July of 2015, Sarawak Report had further revealed that prime minister Najib had received $681 million into his own personal account in KL just days after the same Khadem Al Qubaisi had helped orchestrate the raising of the third and $3 billion bond issue from which it would soon be proved the money indeed came.

Sarawak Report continued unravelling the case with a series of further articles through 2015 detailing how his half billion dollar Vasco Trust account had furnished lavish spending on a yacht (owned by Sheikh Mansour), a top New York penthouse, a massive Beverley Hills mansion and fleets of cars.  Also, Sarawak Report had detailed a number of other highly compromising business deals by Aabar linked to Jho Low.

On September 26th, the month before the emergency email interchange, Sarawak Report had published an in-depth investigation into Al Qubaisi’s wealth and how his investments were managed out of the half billion dollar Vasco trust account at Edmond de Rothschild.

We had further revealed that his key contact at the bank, the CEO Marc Ambroisien, had accepted the generous gift of a €250,000 Aston Martin DBS (RM1.1 million) Martin motor car from ‘KAQ’ which doubtless had helped smooth the path that by-passed the most basic money laundering checks on the hundreds of millions that had flowed into the account from Jho Low’s companies 2012/13.

Three days after that in depth expose, Ariane had apparently first reached out to Epstein for help, asking “Can we talk about the Abu Dhabi guy?”. At first Epstein was confused as to who the “Abu Dhabi guy” was. He queried if she meant some other person they had apparently discussed, who was from Qatar. No, it was Khadem al Qubaisi, she explained. Epstein had replied that he could talk “now if you like”, adding “I will be on cell for next 30 minutes then available from 1800 your time”:

The following day, presumably after their call had filled him in on the story, Epstein sent Ariane sent another email attaching a link to an article reproducing the details of the story written by Sarawak Report entitled “Billionaires in hot soup: wanted Malaysian tycoon Jho Low, Aabar’s sacked chief Khadem”.

Her short response said it all: “yes that’s why I am so worried”.

By the following day Epstein was on to one of his key contacts, a lawyer called Kathrine Ruemmler. His email asked “should we get the Colorado woman on the phone? I have a quick question re [redacted] when you get a chance”.  He then attached a link to Sarawak Report’s original article entitled “Why did Jho Low’s company Good Star Limited pay Aabar’s to executive Khadem al Qubaisi $20 million?”. Ruemmler had replied she had left a message on his cell phone but was in her office…. indicating perhaps that it would be better to communicate after she had left.

Ruemmler, whom Epstein called ‘Kathy’ was a former Obama administration lawyer with excellent contacts in the then Democrat government. In a later email about Sarawak Report (below) she said she was “very proud” to be Epstein’s friend and she has featured in numerous Epstein messages.

[A decade later, in her current role as head of legal affairs at …. Goldman Sachs, Reummler failed to respond to separate queries posed by Sarawak Report last November relating to the bank’s role in a toxic corporate takeover battle being waged in Latin America.]

A further email exchange referring to Sarawak Report’s investigations affecting Epstein’s banking network is dated March 19th 2016, just days after Sarawak Report reported that Edmond de Rothschild bank had quietly sacked Marc Ambroisien, which had in turn followed the dismissal of Goldman Sachs Southeast Asia boss, Tim Leissner, and the ‘early retirement’ of BSI’s Swiss Singapore head Hans Peter Brunner.

Earlier in that year another devastating article by Sarawak Report had confirmed that Jho Low was indeed the owner of the so-called Blackstone Asia Real Estate Partners which had been sending Al Qubaisi all that money into the Edmond de Rothschild Vasco Trust account.

In this March email Epstein includes interesting names from the circle of concerned parties in this matter. “I know Ruben Jeffries has mentioned the Sarawak Report” he tells Ariane de Rothschild, and he suggests that she give ‘Kathy’ “point authority on Luxembourg strategy, for dealing with justice, regulators internal and PR; one strategy well thought through”:

Ruben Jeffery was the President and CEO of Rockerfeller & Co at that time and previously a long-term banker at Goldman Sachs, interspersed with political roles having supported George Bush’s election in 2000 . Was a deal between the bank and the asset management company being held up over the scandalous revelations Ruben had picked up from Sarawak Report and were Jeffery’s Goldman Sachs contacts equally under pressure?

The ‘Kathy’ whom Jeffry Epstein recommended to solve the situation was the same, Kathrine Ruemmler whom Epstein had asked for input on the matter the previous October.

Rest up at my island Epstein urged Ariane de Rothschild

The level of crisis experienced by the multi-billionaire pals apparently caused by SR’s 1MDB exposures radiates through the note-form email.

Epstein expresses concern that top banker Ariane, who was married to Edmond de Rothschild, owner of the bank, was in meltdown…. maybe she would benefit from a trip to his Island he suggested?”
“I fully understand your exhaustion.. is it possible that you rest without such a physically demanding trip to mangua [sic]? Come visit my island… I worry that you are pushing yourself too hard.”

A third email about Sarawak Report was sent by the above Kathy Ruemmler herself to Epstein 2nd September 2016. She cites this blog in the subject line referencing an article from a few days earlier: ‘Re: 90 Federal Police Officers Raided Edmond de Rothschild Bank! How Aabar Scandal Could Dwarf 1MDB../Sarawak Report“.

Epstein replied suggesting she bring by a mutual contact to see him and suggesting a movie she should watch. She agreed to do both saying “and most important): I=am proud to know you, and very proud you are my friend.”

It is assumed the duo and their contact discussed the further unravelling of Edmond de Rothschild’s 1MDB imbroglio when they met. Days later it would emerge that by this stage of the affair with, Ariane de Rothschild, had herself already been (temporarily) axed by her husband’s bank, which is perhaps one reason why Kathy was keen to cheer Epstein up – her fixing had not worked.

Earlier in April Sarawak Report had reported how the now former CEO was comforted “Don’t worry – you are untouchable!” by a companion after being questioned by journalists about 1MDB. The scandal has proven that not to be the case with numerous greedy financiers who had apparently learned, like Epstein, that big money buys a pass (until it doesn’t).

However, there remain serious questions about the level of punishment incurred. Ms de Rothschild has now inherited her husband’s bank and returned as CEO of its combined operations in 2023. Nearly nine years after the scandal in May 2025 it was finally brought to book becoming the first Luxembourg bank ever to be convicted of money laundering under her watch. In punishment, the bank agreed to merely pay a $25 million fine – water off a duck’s back?

Marc Ambroisien was himself investigated by the Luxembourg financial regulator and banned from the sector for ten years in 2020 – another slap on the wrist for a white collar professional compared to the harsh punishments faced by those who have stolen far less?

Now, it seems possible that more of her actions may finally catch up with the ‘untouchable’ Ariane. When the Wall Street Journal first cited her connections to Epstein in 2023 her bank apparently first saw fit to issue a statement denying she had met with him, however later said she had encountered him in the course of her “usual duties’ 2013-19.

Whether such duties could have included holiday offers on Epstein’s Island seems far fetched. To the contrary, it is clear from these emails that Epstein was providing advice to herself and her deputy on how to handle Sarawak Report’s revelations over 1MDB, through emails and also unrecorded telephone conversations and meetings.

Other emails make clear this was part of a wider relationship in which Ariane de Rothschild was further linked to Epstein’s wider network of business and political dealings that included another key contact and frequent visitor to Epstein’s home, the former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak. Why did she deny it?

Perhaps few will have been surprised to hear the recent news that  Goldman Sachs’ fall guy,  Tim Leissner, is queuing up (amongst several thousand other hopefuls) to receive a pardon from US President Trump having been painstakingly brought to justice over the course of a decade of investigations into the record 1MDB theft of billions from the Malaysian public.

He is merely taking a leaf out of the book from the guy at the top, prime minister Najib Razak.  Also like Najib, in doing so he has demonstrated his continuing access to large sums of money to expend on lawyers to perform endless applications for delay and other special favours, despite having supposedly surrendered all the proceeds of his crimes.

Given that the US system of justice appears to have suddenly become as nakedly open to accusations of ‘undue influence’ as the “Third World sh**hole countries” the US President so openly denigrates, that pot of money could look to be pivotal.

Back in 2020, Trump immediately pardoned the wealthy Republican fundraiser, Elliott Broidy, for his greedy attempts to sabotage the ongoing US investigations into the scandal (accepting payments from Jho Low and acting to assist a Chinese state spy ring in the process), whereas the more modest player on his team, Nancy Lum Davis (of Asian background) served the sentence.  Likewise, it is so far only the Malaysian Goldman Sachs banker, Roger Ng, who has seen the inside of a cell.

However, the ex-banker is not putting all his eggs in that one basket. There are other pleas which have delayed and sought to mitigate his sentence as he, like Najib, seeks the kid glove treatment and believes he deserves it.

Leissner has gained sympathy, certainly from the DOJ, for turning star witness in the case and testifying against Ng.  However, given that Ng is the only criminal prosecution to have resulted from the case so far and the enormous fines and civil asset seizures largely resulted from basic anti-money laundering investigation work, it is arguable that Leissner’s main contribution was to add colour to the narrative.

The fact of what Jho Low, Najib and Goldman Sachs and their co-conspirators did is there in the black and white printouts from the banking transactions. It was published by the DOJ in their original civil asset seizure filings long before Leissner was picked up.

Yet, it seems that the extremely light sentence that was finally meted out to the banker at the end of last year, after five years of delays and postponements, is not sufficient reward in his view. While Leissner is trying to get off the hook entirely he has meanwhile also sought to delay the enforcement of his sentence – now for the third time, until February 16th.

Moreover, he has started lobbying to change the location of his incarceration from a low security category facility on the East Coast of the United States, where he was brought to justice, to one in Sunny Southern California. This happens to be where his now divorced family lives in a grand residence that he secured with stolen 1MDB money.

His ex-wife (model Kimora Lee Simmonds) apparently shows no intention of surrendering the 25 million dollar mansion that Leissner has admitted in court that he purchased using stolen 1MDB related cash passed to him via the Kuwaiti Sheikh Sabah who is now himself serving a jail sentence of ten years in his own country for agreeing to act as a front for Najib and Jho Low.

Worse, Leissner acknowledged in court when giving testimony against Roger Ng that no one at the Department of Justice has asked him to forfeit this asset that is rightly belonging to Malaysia. One assumes his cooperation in nailing his former colleague Roger Ng has bought that leniency at Malaysia’s expense. This was the dialogue as he testified in court:

Q And the FBI and the Department of Justice, they let you

live in that mansion after your arrest, right?

A [Leissner] Yes, I lived there.

Q They let you keep the mansion, right?

A They haven’t forfeited that mansion.

Q They didn’t forfeit it, right?  As you sit here today, it’s still not forfeited, right?

A That’s correct.  [Roger Ng Trial, Testimony of Tim Leissner]

Shares worth $400 Million Dollars plus

And this brings us to another matter relating to unreturned Malaysian money. Leissner and his former family are still squabbling with the DOJ as to who should benefit from the hundreds of millions of dollars worth of Celsius shares (a Chinese soft drinks company) that Leissener also bought into using 1MDB stolen funds.

The shares have leapt in value over the period from being worth just $3 million to over $400 million. That might look like a bit of silver lining for Malaysians, could they be hopeful of seeing the well-informed investment returned.

However, it has emerged that Leissner’s Ex reckons the money is owed to her; not only that, her own previous Ex (an American ‘Hip Hop artist’ called Russell Simmonds)  thinks some should also go to him!

When the duo originally made this seemingly preposterous claim back in 2021 the DOJ was robust in its rebuttal. A company in their name had been, Nu Horizons, had indeed been used by Leissner to hold the c 3.3 million shares he had purchased using 1MDB cash. It was merely to disguise his ownership given they were the proceeds of his crime.

Therefore, detailed the rebuttal, neither the Ex nor the Ex’s Ex had put up the money to buy the lucky shares: they had merely provided the cover to hide the ill-gotten assets, meaning they were by no means deserving of any of them:

“the only payment towards the purchase of the Celsius Shares was a wire transfer from an account held by another entity, Asian Sports Ventures HK, which was personally arranged by defendant Leissner. Thus, it is evident that neither Nu Horizons nor Petitioner [Russell Simmonds] gave anything of value in exchange for the Celsius Shares necessary to qualify as a purchaser” [Government rebuttal of Russell Simmonds claim to the $400 million Celsius Shares Nov 2023]

However, the duo have persisted, even though Simmonds had exited his share of the front company in 2018 before he realised it was sitting on a gold mine.  They both want their cut and have claimed they had made the original investments back in 2015. This despite the fact that Leissner had already poured millions into the model’s ‘Baby Phat’ venture (he testified that he bought 70% of it with the stolen money).

The persistence appears to have paid off, as once again the DOJ looks set to carve a lenient deal towards them in a settlement that would also give the department, which has already exacted massive fines from Goldman Sachs, a nice slice of the money. Nothing to Malaysia is so far mooted, although previously the proceeds of confiscated assets were returned.

It should not be forgotten either that from the statements produced in court it seems evident that some $170 million is still missing from the overall equation following the sale of Leissner’s 1MDB funded company Midas Commodities on the day after the 2018 election.  This is money that has apparently never been accounted for and the evidence suggests Leissner has it waiting for him in Central European tax havens, once he has finished his soft prison sentence.

The story of 1MDB has thus gradually evolved from a promising narrative of US enforcement bringing white-collar criminals to rightful justice to a more tawdry looking tale of bargaining, double standards and departmental greed.

Meanwhile, the most salient admissions of all in Mr Leissner’s testimony were quietly put to one side by the Department of Justice, once Goldman Sachs had agreed to pay a bonus inspiring record fine of $2.9 billion to the US authorities.

The claim by their star witness, made in court, which the DOJ simply failed to probe further was this:

“During the course of the conspiracy, I conspired with other employees and agents of Goldman Sachs very much in line of its culture of Goldman Sachs to conceal facts from certain compliance and legal employees of Goldman Sachs, including the fact that Jho Low, who is identified as Co-Conspirator Number 1 in the information, was acting as a intermediary for on behalf of Goldman Sachs, 1MDB, and Malaysian and Abu Dhabi officials”

Leissner went on during his court testimony to specifically name four senior Goldman Sachs bankers who definitively knew, and agreed to keep secret, that the officially ‘Red Flagged’ Jho Low was the main player behind the bond deals which had raised record profits for the bank (meaning record bonuses all round).

These included Andrea Vella the head of capital markets and investments who he describe as the most senior role to be paid on 1MDB transactions. “He was really, I would say, the deal captain” Leissner explained. Vella was already the subject of fraud allegations from the Libyan Investment Authority at the time, which had lost huge sums of money on investments managed by Goldman Sachs.

And yet, no-one further up the ladder at Goldman Sachs or any colleague of Leissner and Ng has ever been pursued over this admitted conspiracy, of which Leissner plainly has evidence. Vella escaped with the loss of his job and a ban by the Federal Reserve from any further engagement in the banking industry. There was no fine or admission of wrongdoing required from the wealthy banker who had scooped fat bonuses from ripping off Malaysia.

The other colleagues and seniors, who could plainly make what Leissner described as an ‘Asian Conclusion’ about what was going on (bribes to officials), were left to continue as before.

Therefore, whilst Malaysian corruption has been taken very seriously (and rightly so) the appetite to tackle US and other versions of the same disease appears to have subsequently and very publicly collapsed.

One picture can speak volumes, as we know. The telecom tower dispute that has pitched Goldman Sachs and supporting New York arbitrators into conflict with the court rulings of multiple Latin American countries contains an album of such images.

Also, copious documentation that has left the judiciary in those various countries scratching their heads over a slam dunk series of rulings coming out of New York, against reasonable protests, that appear designed to put one of the key communications infrastructure companies in the region firmly into the hands of Goldman Sachs and its affiliates.

The company in question is Terra Towers, till recently a thrusting Latin American construction company, controlled  by a youthful Guatemalan entrepreneur who pushed into the forefront of the strategic telecoms business as a builder and owner of internet communications towers across Central America and beyond. The sector is a growing multi billion dollar concern involving key issues of national sovereignty.

One of many telling images in the available document trove is a photograph featuring a Miami lawyer, Adam Schachter, posing at an eatery in New York between two officers  of a company named Continental Towers which he had been recently hired to represent.

These were the purported CEO of the company, Jorge Gaitan, and Gaitan’s newly appointed COO, Carol Echeverria.

Continental Towers represents a critical Joint Venture between Terra Towers and a Private Equity outfit backed by Goldman Sachs, the Ohio based Peppertree Capital Management (PPT).

It is a paper holding entity, incorporated in the British Virgin Islands in 2015, that governed by two directors from Peppertree and two from Terra Towers. The shareholders were in deadlock by 2020 and Peppertree, supported by the other shareholder, its finance partner Goldman Sachs, had forced the arbitration, hence the engagement of Mr Schachter as a ‘neutral representative’ for the company.

The date of the photograph is October 5th 2021 and the trio look convivial and relaxed. Yet, just five days later, Schachter would be submitting on the duo’s behalf a tale of trauma, kidnap and betrayal to the New York based arbitration court that would firmly colour the outcome of the unfolding dispute .  Gaitan and Echaverria would complain that they had fled from Guatemala after being detained, threatened, bullied and then sacked by the Terra Towers boss, Jorge Hernandez.

Given the alleged circumstances, the joviality of the occasion looks odd and what happened next looks odder still. The same series of snapshots show that the two senior executives and their company lawyer moved to a picture window and linked arms for a second joint ‘selfie’ looking out over a floodlight night-time cityscape with distinctive landmarks. The picture appears to have been taken by Gaitan with each of the men laying a friendly arm over Ms Echeverria (see featured picture above).

Then, according to the photo sequence, Schachter turned into the photographer capturing the allegedly traumatised work colleagues in the same spot,  as the married CEO planted a lingering kiss on the upturned lips of his equally married COO. Schachter took several shots of the romantic moment.

It is a photo that has raised several new dimensions to the tense dispute between the Latin American and US parties within that company.  Many of a similar nature were later discovered on his mobile phone and then widely distributed by Jorge Gaitan’s infuriated wife, who is seeking a divorce and the return of her three children removed into her husband’s exclusive custody using the assistance of high-powered lawyers, whom she says includes Schachter. The available evidence reveals that Mr Schachter was indeed engaged in the process of helping both Gaitan and Echeverria meet a slew of legal expenses – and that the billing includes work on the Gaitan’s domestic case.

The mobile phone album shows that the colleagues, despite the delicate circumstances, had engaged in dozens of recreational trysts around Latin America and the US, for which Terra Towers later denounced them criminally as being paid for out of an alleged embezzlement from the company of over a million dollars in fake expenses.

However, by the time such evidence came to light the New York arbitrators had already accepted Mr Gaitan and Mr Schachter’s kidnap claims and had dismissed all allegations against Gaitan and Echaverria as being maliciously contrived.  They have refused to even review the alleged evidence against the couple and much more that has subsequently emerged.

Meanwhile parallel actions initiated in Latin American jurisdictions have reviewed the facts, coming to very different conclusions that have resulted in ongoing prosecutions in El Salvador, Guatemala and Panama.

Mrs Gaitan not only discovered pictures on her husband’s phones and computers, she has also turned over telling texts and messages derived from a ‘CT Arbitration’ WhatsApp Chat  Group

comprising the ‘neutral’ Continental Towers lawyer, Adam Schachter, Jorge Gaitan, Carol Echeverria and another company lawyer, Jean Paul Dechamps.

These texts show bias towards Peppertree/ Goldman Sachs and undermine the claims and accusations made against Terra Towers in the litigation, say Mr Hernandez’s lawyers.

For example, texts indicating collusion with Peppertree lawyers in the conduct of the litigation such as:

“[Dechamps] Email looks good. We should send it asap so PPT [Peppertree] can use it in their submission”

and:

“[Gaitan] Adam, it is important you tell Ungar [Peppertree’s counsel] that we strongly demand from them to ask for our restoration into the company operation…  Mr Gaitan and Ms Echaverria are more than happy they reach out to our personal lawyer from Carrillo law..  ”

Prosecutors in Guatemala have now seized several more computers and devices which are being deployed in an ongoing criminal case against the couple for alleged breach of trust against their main employers Terra Towers.

Yet, again this evidence has been totally excluded from the deliberations of the Arbitration Tribunal in New York, which has opted to take for granted that the two executives are innocent victims rather than globetrotting opportunists allegedly enticed into taking sides.

Background Of A Takeover Battle

Continental Towers (CT) was established as a holding entity to represent the shared interest of Peppertree Capital Management (PPT) which had invested $125 million to buy 32% of the equity of Terra Towers and a related chunk of Mr Henandez’s businesses in 2015 in order to help fund their growth.

As part of that arrangement PPT had insisted on introducing its own funder, Goldman Sachs, into the shareholding structure with a 13% interest and observer status on the equally divided board between Peppertree and Terra Towers.

Henandez’s lawyers had resisted that move at the time, warning repeatedly that the last minute request to insert the powerful bank into the ownership structure would allow Goldman Sachs to wield undue influence as a lender, allowing it to close down or take over the concern. However, PPT had made their belated suggestion a condition of the deal.

By the time of the cosy New York meal in October 2021 the parties had seriously fallen out over the very scenario which had been warned of, with Mr Hernandez accusing Peppertree/ Goldman Sachs of having acted in bad faith in making the investment, which his lawyers now characterised as a clear and calculated attempt to infiltrate his businesses in order to squeeze him out and take it over for a fraction of its true value.

Court papers submitted by Terra Towers detail an alleged immediate campaign by the new minority shareholders to exert their influence to control and undermine the company with an ultimate purpose of executing a virtually cost-free takeover by squeezing out Mr Hernandez.

Tactics included burdensome credit agreements demanded with Goldman Sachs (rejected) followed by deadlocking the board to prevent the company from fulfilling its contracts and engaging in new business, say the lawyers. It culminated in an attempt to force Terra to accept a pre-negotiated sale process drawn up by Goldman Sachs and Peppertree to one of the bank’s other client telecom companies, with which Peppertree had covertly organised a new joint shareholding arrangement.

The sale process laid out by Peppertree/Goldman Sachs threatened, say Hernandez’s lawyers, to land Terra Towers with major hidden costs and a minuscule residual profit compared to a $600m offer Hernandez had earlier managed to obtain from a third party potential buyer for Continental Towers  – a deal they claimed had been nixed by the two minority shareholders with their hidden agenda.  Instead, the offer floated by the PPT/Goldman Sachs with their secret ally (a US company called Torrecom) was a mere $400m, which stood to be whittled down under the sales process they had drawn up.

The wider objective, according to Hernandez’s lawyers, being for Goldman Sachs to snatch further control of the heavily strategic and hugely profitable telecoms infrastructure network in Latin America, into which the pejoratively dubbed ‘Vampire Squid’ had already embedded itself through several further rival affiliates – and all for a rock bottom price at the expense of the business the local businessman had developed.

The Peppertree/Goldman Sachs retort has been that Mr Hernandez, in demanding to control the sales process by naming an independent bank to manage it, has ben unreasonably opposing any sale.

The matter had been with the New York AAA/ICDR arbitration court since February 2021. Almost immediately, the head of the Tribunal, Marc Goldstein, controversially ruled that a sale must first be executed before he would entertain any of the complaints by Terra: thereby ignoring that the board was deadlocked over who should call the shots on such a sale, and the question as to how Terra might gain compensation for the losses to its businesses caused by the alleged sabotage once any sale had been completed.

As the failure to thereby agree a sale dragged into months then years, the Tribunal squarely blamed Terra for being the obstacle, in line with the accusations of Peppertree/Goldman Sachs, and started issuing orders and financial penalties for ‘non-compliance’. Lawyers’ fees and other costs started to build up and were contested.

Terra Towers consistently found itself the losing party in every application to the court: barred from discovery, barred from bringing evidence, barred from bringing witnesses and then penalised for disobeying orders it complained it cannot practically perform – of which more later.

These rulings were perhaps predictably backed by the local district court in Southern New York (where Goldman Sachs is based) largely on the routine assumption that those who sign up to arbitration should abide by it. In March last year the arbitration tribunal awarded PPT/Goldman Sachs a staggering $354 million in costs and damages on the grounds of Terra’s ‘non-compliance’, a judgement that was upheld by the SDNY court the following month.

In the meantime, matters have unfolded very differently in the jurisdictions of Latin America, where the sprawling business of Terra Towers has spawned assets and subsidiaries across several countries, including Guatemala, El Salvador, Panama and Peru (the only asset within US jurisdiction is Mr Henandez’s private residential property worth several million).

In these countries investigations have leaned increasingly in favour of Terra Towers’ concerns, culminating in the incarceration of Jorge Gaitan and his father last April, and the issuing of INTERPOL Red Notice arrest warrants by El Salvador for the Peppertree Directors in November.

Significantly, in October, the Guatemalan court ordered the freezing of the New York Arbitration ruling over Terra assets in that country pending the outcome of its own criminal proceedings against Jorge Gaitan and Carol Echevarria (who was herself arrested, incarcerated and then bailed in June).

A reason for this discrepancy appears to be that these local jurisdictions have considered the matters that had deliberately excluded from the arbitration under its unusual determination that the company must first be sold before complaints were heard or discovery allowed.

Between 2021 and 2025, as events unfolded and new evidence came to light, the various Latin American investigations got underway, whilst the New York Tribunal remained focused on the sale and ruled all other matters as being irrelevant to that objective. Moreover, the Tribunal (thanks to Gaitan’s victim statement) continued to unilaterally determine the growing body of serious allegations to be, self-evidently, manufactured lies by Terra Towers:

 “What occurred […] in this proceeding has turned out to have been a multi-faceted effort by Respondents to present to this Tribunal and to the Company’s Board a false narrative of misconduct and criminality by Mr. Gaitan and Ms. Echeverria” in order to gain a “tactical advantage in this arbitration.” [Tribunal’s 2nd Partial Award ruling, 12th August 2022]

Faced with the undermining of its own judgements by domestic Latin American court rulings, the foreign New York based Tribunal has moreover ordered Terra Towers to halt all its local criminal and civil complaints and withdraw from any proceedings that have contradicted its own findings, thereby creating a battle of jurisdictions between a private American arbitration panel and several Latin American countries who have now been implied by that Tribunal to be inadequate or corrupt.

This is a matter of US ‘uber alles’ when it comes to jurisdiction, in the opinion of one court appointed official representing the threatened interests of some 2,000 workers across the company, who told Sarawak Report “This case is legal colonisation or legal imperialism infringing in the sovereignty of independent countries“.

Given the current tensions in the region, the case where the New York courts have backed the city’s top bank against a beleaguered Latin American business could fast become a cause celebre.

Objective Legal Counsel?

At the beginning, a resolution had looked more hopeful. Mr Schachter had drawn up an initial Framework Agreement to govern his role as counsel for the BVI joint venture holding entity in the immediate aftermath of the arbitration initiated by Peppertree/Goldman Sachs.

This positioned himself and the Continental Towers officers (whose active jobs involved working for Terra’s subsidiary companies) as neutral arbiters to represent the company as a whole, without favouring either of the rival parties who were now at loggerheads having been forced into arbitration by the minority shareholders Peppertree/Goldman Sachs.

The Framework Agreement was also predicated on Schachter accepting Mr Gaitain as his sole boss in his capacity as the ‘Continental Towers CEO’ who had formally been designated to hire him.

On the surface all seemed correct.  An initial Shareholder Agreement had indeed designated Mr Gaitan as the CEO in 2015, therefore lawyers working for Terra Towers, who had not been party to intervening developments, did not immediately question the matter – they signed the agreement in March 2021.

However, just as Gaitan and Echaverria were cosying up to Schachter in New York those Terra legal staff say they realised their mistake with the final arrival of incorporation documents from local lawyers in Guatemala (see Declaration of Danelle J Kirby 8th/4/24 Court of SDNY)

These showed that in May 2016, at the insistence of Peppertree directors themselves (Howard Mandel and Ryan Lepene who reportedly at the time considered he did not exhibit sufficient qualities to represent the company), Mr Gaitan had been replaced as CEO by one of the Terra Directors, Alberto Arzu, through a unanimous vote of the board.

This demotion of Gaitan to COO is clearly reflected in the BVI corporate records which also registers that change:

Following the initiation of the aggressive arbitration battle in March 2021, Mr Arzu had opted to retire. He was replaced as a Terra director but there was no replacement for the nominal role of CEO, which needed the agreement of the divided shareholders.

By the time Terra lawyers realised in mid-October that Mr Gaitan was acting as an imposter (as they saw it)  they had come to suspect also that he was colluding with Peppertree.  Certainly, the failure of Peppertree to point out that Adam Schachter’s Framework Agreement had been faulty in citing Jorge Gaitan as CEO was puzzling if not suspicious.

After all, Peppertree’s own submission to force the arbitration back in February of that year had correctly cited Mr Arzu as being the CEO and not Jorge Gaitan. There was therefore no question that Peppertree knew that Mr Gaitan was not approved, yet they failed to point the matter out and subsequently argued, with the backing of the arbitration panel, that the lack of appointment by the board didn’t matter because the wording of the Framework Agreement had effectively re-appointed him.

Except, the rules of the company require unanimous approval by the board – and Terra Towers directors no longer had faith in Mr Gaitan. Likewise, they rejected Mr Gaitan’s decision to appoint his girlfriend, Ms Echeverria, to his own former position as COO, which was among his first actions in the job. She actually held a more junior role in a Terra subsidiary.

Equally, Terra Towers rejected Jorge Gaitan’s separate retainer of another high-flying (therefore costly) arbitration lawyer, Jean Paul Dechamps, given they had not even been notified of the expensive hire  and plainly regarded Dechamps as being partial to Peppertree/Goldman Sachs.

Terra Towers management had come to suspect, therefore, that the determination by Peppertree/Goldman Sachs to retain Mr Gaitan owed to a developing relationship between them over past several months as the takeover battles had developed.

Those suspicions were bolstered as emails came to light, for example, messages revealing he had visited the Peppertree’s headquarters in Chagrin Falls Ohio over a year previously and indulged in close banter with director John Ranieri:

At the same time, major business investments that Mr Gaitan had not declared to his own bosses, which he secretly and illegally initiated through Terra Towers’ Panama subsidiaries, were found to have been known about and engaged in by his pals at Peppertree, specifically John Ranieri:

Panamanian authorities have now initiated their own legal actions based on complaints about these allegedly illicit multi-million dollar investments by Gaitan lodged by Terra Towers.  Further collaboration would later emerge, according to a statement submitted in May 2024 by Terra Towers’ lawyer Brian Dunning.

The company had discovered that three months before the Goldman buy-out demand the two executives, Gaitan and Echeverria, had incorporated their own company, Tandem Infrastructure SA, which had secretly signed a non-disclosure agreement to send confidential information to a company that acted as ‘Advisor’ to a direct competitor of their employer Terra Towers.

Dunning points to convincing evidence that the duo’s company was linked to an outfit of the same name in the US, Tandem Infrastructure Inc, controlled by Goldman Sachs as part of its so-called LARA (Latin American Real Assets Opportunities Fund) initiative: altogether, it made for a strong smell of collaboration.

Again, prior to the October 2021 visit with lawyer Adam Schachter to New York, Gaitan together with Echeverria had once again met up with Ranieri in Chagrin falls, according to further photo evidence, dated 18th August 2021.

It was the events following this get together, including a showdown meeting at the Terra Towers office Guatemala on 28th September, that would result in the watershed crisis which would have a permanent and damaging effect on the reputation of Chairman Jorge Hernandez in the eyes of the arbitration panel and become the basis for a slew of prejudicial rulings, followed by  increasingly punitive sanctions for alleged non-compliance with those rulings.

‘Harassment’ Of Jorge Gaitan 

The months of September and October 2021, saw the slide into toxic allegations that would underpin the later $354 million award against Terra Towers (effectively the hand over of the company to Goldman Sachs’ client co-shareholders Peppertree) – likewise the criminal complaints that would enmesh Peppertree in charges of fraud in Latin America. These were focused around the conduct of Jorge Gaitan.

Jorge Gaitan would later state that he had began to bear the brunt of resentment from his boss, Jorge Hernandez, over his determination to fulfil his duty to be even handed as CEO of Continental Towers in keeping with the terms of the Framework Agreement.

In particular, Adam Schachter had issued an email to Terra’s subsidiaries ordering them not to continue work on projects not unanimously agreed by all Continental Towers shareholders. Yet that ostensibly neutral command was seen as a deadly blow to Terra’s interests by Hernandez, given that Peppertree/Goldman Sachs’ tactics for the past four years had been to block all construction activities at board level in order, allegedly, to bring the company to its knees, depress its value and take it over.

Terra had started fulfilling its fiduciary obligations on various contracts in defiance, which was what provided the foundation for the minority shareholder arbitration complaint accusing Terra of ‘stealing’ funds to do so without authorisation.

The growing tension caused Gaitan to anticipate being sacked, he would later tell the Arbitration Court in a victim statement. Hernandez acknowledges he had begun to require that Gaitan’s office should properly back up its records to the Cloud, given it was the only division of the company that had not done so, meaning records were not being shared and could be lost. For reasons unexplained, Gaitan had refused to do so.

Hernandez then called a meeting at his Guatemala Headquarters for September 28th. The day before, as CCTV cameras later showed, two colleagues close to Gaitan and Echeverria entered their offices and over several hours had removed all of the computers and paperwork, leaving no records to be examined and extracting confidential company information in the process.

There are different versions of what transpired at the meeting the following day which lasted for several hours involving several staff. The Terra Towers personnel who provided witness statements for Mr Hernandez, and Hernandez himself, say that Mr Gaitan was requested to restore his company information so that all records could be properly backed up, and that Gaitan persistently refused. Echeverria promised to do so (but apparently did not).

The Terra version of events is that at the end of the meeting both officers, plus their allies who had performed the clear out, left the premises and failed to return. After three days, under Guatemalan law, they had thereby dismissed themselves and had moreover committed a crime by removing sensitive company information and deleting records. This formed that basis of a later criminal complaint by the company, which also terminated them and their allies from its employment.

The duo had, of course, already headed to the US for their October meetings and later arbitration hearing. The costs of their travel would turn out to have been billed to another Terra Towers subsidiary in El Salvador where Gaitan’s father held a job and his son provided contracting work.

Later investigations of the finances of that subsidiary by an independent outside auditor would result in a report claiming that the Gaitans had abused expenses and milked the El Salvador subsidiary to the tune of $1.2 million.

Terra Towers’ ensuing criminal complaint would later result in charges in El Salvador as well, which in 2024 issued an extradition request to Guatemala where Gaitan had been bailed over the separate allegations of theft of company records.

Back in October 2021, a week after the photo-session in New York, Adam Schachter as the CT legal counsel, submitted a shocking letter of complaint to the Arbitration Tribunal detailing what he described as an appalling level of harassment meted out to Jorge Gaitan and Carol Echeverria by Hernandez at the September 28th meeting.

The meeting in Guatemala had constituted an effective kidnap and imprisonment during which the couple were bullied in the Terra Towers meeting room in order to surrender up information about the arbitration and start collaborating with Terra Towers in a biased manner, wrote Schachter.  The lawyer described how armed guards (Hernandez’s habitual bodyguards) had intimidated and restrained them and that the pair had been arbitrarily sacked for refusing to abuse their roles to favour Terra Towers.

“Over the past several months, Mr. Jorge Alberto Gaitán Castro, the Chief Executive Officer and member of the executive team of Continental Towers, has been subjected to an increasing level of harassment and improper pressure from Mr. Jorge Hernández,…this harassment turned into a crisis on Tuesday, September 28, 2021, when Mr. Gaitán and other members of the management team based in Guatemala City, Guatemala, were ushered into a conference room adjacent to Mr. Hernández’s office. Mr. Gaitán and the management team were mostly confined to the area around this conference room and not permitted to leave until very late in the evening. During the time of their detention, Mr. Hernández unleashed an angry and abusive tirade at Mr. Gaitán and his team, stating that he did not trust them. In addition to the verbal attacks, Mr. Hernández’s agents confiscated Mr. Gaitán’s and his team’s computers, searched their offices, disabled their email access, and conducted a search of Mr. Gaitán’s personal car. Mr. Gaitán was rattled and terrified by the entire episode, fearing for his personal well-being, as well as the safety and well-being of his colleagues. Mr. Gaitán, who is diabetic, also suffered medical distress as a result…. This account relies primarily on the firsthand description provided by Mr. Gaitán, which he has memorialized through contemporaneous notes and other means….. To be completely candid, I have never encountered a situation like this in my professional career..” [Adam Schachter Letter of 11th October 2021 to the Tribunal]

This version of the encounter was expanded on at a special hearing on October 20th where Peppertree directors expressed their shock at the testimony (although John Ranieri would later acknowledge he had also met with the couple during their visit to New York and it therefore came as no surprise).  Indeed, Terra Towers counsel claim the whole narrative was drawn up in collusion with Schachter and the minority complainants in the case to gain advantage.

The panel duly responded with dramatic measures. The pair must be re-instated, the Chairman Marc Goldstein insisted, not only to their position at the relevant joint venture company Continental Towers, but to the jobs they had walked out of at Terra Towers as well (a matter for Guatemalan jurisdiction given the duo had lodged various employment claims against the company). Likewise, their salaries must continue to be paid, as well as their legal fees and all the fees of the two lawyers (now heading towards half a million dollars). Ultimately, the loser in the arbitration could expect to pick up the overall tab.

Terra Towers had submitted its counter information saying that it was now established that Gaitan was not actually legally appointed as CEO in the first place and therefore had no locus to appoint Echeverria or the two lawyers. Therefore, the order to reappoint these officers to positions they had never legally held was an impossible demand.

However, Goldstein again ruled against them, deciding that the Framework Agreement, although it violated the original Shareholder Agreement that underlay the joint venture, should be regarded as sufficient to confirm both officers and both lawyers.

Significantly, the Tribunal refused to hear any of Terra Tower’s 16 witnesses to the actual events of the alleged kidnapping and harassment described by Gaitan or to look at the evidence collected by the company that undermined their story, such as selfies taken by Gaitan showing what appeared to be a relaxed and normal meeting (under Covid conditions).

Only Mr Hernandez and Mr Gaitan were permitted to produce statements at the hearing.  In its ruling Mr Gaitan’s word was taken over the word of Mr Hernandez by the Tribunal (which arbitrarily concluded Hernandez to be an unreliable witness).  As a result, according to the lengthy complaint of bias that was later made by Hernandez’s lawyers to the Southern District Court of New York, the events that day were entirely misrepresented.

That complaint would be rejected by Judge Kaplan of the New York Southern District Court which would later uphold the draconian rulings against Terra Towers, prompting a jubilant pose by Ms Echeverria through yet another telling text, this time to a “Victory” WhatsApp Group comprising the same circle as the CT Arbitration Group:

Six months later a Guatemalan court would review the details and the evidence that had been refused submission by the Arbitration Tribunal and come to a very different conclusion. The Judge stated there was no evidence whatsoever that Ms Echeverria and Jorge Gaitan were kept imprisoned at their office and intimidated for 7 hours till late at night.

To the contrary he noted that electronic key records proved that Ms Echeverria had left the building and re-entered at least four times during the course of the afternoon of 28th September, during which time she claimed they were held captive. “the witnesses were never detained” the judge concluded.

Enforcement

Terra Towers responded to the negative rulings with a series of requests for clarification and petitions that their growing body of evidence of potential fraud be heard. The company pointed out that the matter of re-instatement of Gaitan and Echeverria to their local jobs had been submitted by the couple themselves to Guatemalan employment law in the form of demands for compensation – it was not for US jurisdiction to demand their salaries ought to continue to be paid meanwhile.

All to no avail. Terra Towers consistently found itself the losing party in every application: barred from normal discovery, barred from bringing evidence, barred from bringing witnesses and then penalised for disobeying orders the company complained it cannot practically perform

Meanwhile, the photographic records continued to counter the claims of neutrality of Mr Gaitan, whom the Tribunal now treated as being restored to his post as the CEO of Continental Towers.

In January of 2022 the neutral officers were back visiting John Ranieri at Chagrin Falls. Likewise, the neutral CT lawyers, also ordered back to their posts by the Tribunal, were making no bones about whose side they favoured.

After a very successful year of judgements in their collective favour Adam Schachter sent this message to the ‘CT Arbitration’ WhatsApp chat group at the end of 2022:

“Carol – you and Jorge continue to be an inspiration to us all. It’s a privilege to work with each of you. Happy New Year and wishing you all health and happiness in 2023″

Fellow lawyer, Jean Paul Dechamps, controversially hired by Mr Gaitan but confirmed in position by the Tribunal ruling, added his own words “Hello team CT arbitration – hope you all had a great start to 2023. I fully echo Adam’s words – Carol and Jorge it really is a privilege to work with you …”

Included in the chat group was Gaitan’s then personal lawyer (being funded by Peppertree), one Juan Carlos Zamora, who also chipped in calling the couple “profiles in courage”.  Mr Gaitan responded with a telling reference, thanking “the people behind” these supportive allies and saying it was “an honour to be on your side”:

Mr Gaitan was in part thanking these lawyers and those behind them for a great deal of financial assistance concerning his growing number of professional and domestic legal battles. With the sanction of the Arbitration Tribunal Peppertree and Goldman Sachs had been meeting the invoices sent in by both Mr Gaitan and Ms Echeverria to pay their string of lawyers.

The Tribunal had ruled that Terra Towers had no right to see those invoices (which if ruled against they would end up paying). However, the evidence supplied by Mr Gaitan’s wife and now other sources, cited and heard by Sarawak Report, make clear that those expenses included his custody battles with his wife.

According to information, the teams of local lawyers were billing Gaitan who then passed the invoices, in collaboration with Mr Schachter and Mr Dechamps, to the two complainant parties. Peppertree and Goldman Sachs would then pay directly into the various lawyers accounts, according to information reliably received.

From 2024 those costs had plainly started to rocket uncontrollably.  The court in Guatemala, acting on the evidence received from Terra Towers issued charges against Gaitan and Echeverra, for which they were initially bailed.

This was followed by an extradition request by El Salvador in April 2025, which under Guatemalan law necessitated Gaitan’s previous bail be replaced by incarceration, given he was judged a flight risk.

Owing to a decision that the Guatemala case be heard first, Gaitan has remained in jail in that country.

Moreover, in May 2025 he compounded his situation by being discovered with illicit communications equipment – a mobile phone, computers – in his cell. This is regarded as a serious criminal violation resulting in further sanctions and costly legal support.

‘Immaculate Incarceration’

However, proceedings over in New York, where the details underpinning Gaitan’s various prosecutions have yet to be admitted into any of the arbitration or district court deliberations, show an attitude of disbelief towards these actions in Latin America.

The grounds for Gaitan’s arrests have continually been mocked for being ‘overly convenient’ for the majority shareholder side, namely the local company Terra Towers. For example, during this Southern District of New York court hearing in April 2025 the Latin American incarcerations were insultingly dismissed as an “Immaculate Incarceration”:

Peppertree Counsel: “I’ve never seen anything like it. I can’t believe the CEO is actually in jail. I don’t even know what they’re going to say about that. And they’ve orchestrated the entire thing just be- —

THE COURT: They’re going to say it was an immaculate incarceration.

Peppertree Counsel: That’s right. Precisely, your Honor. It was an immaculate incarceration for sure.

THE COURT: I mean, it just happened to pop into the mind of some Guatemalan or Salvadorian prosecutor: Gee, why don’t we lock him up. I understand that’s their position.

Peppertree Counsel: Amazing, isn’t it? It’s just amazing, like, complete coincidence.

In the event the court did not at that hearing grant the punitive measures Goldman Sachs and Peppertree had been  asking for to aid the enforcement of the $354 million arbitration award, which included the incarceration of all the Terra parties in a US jail and the expropriation of Hernandez’s US property.

Rather the judge pointed out that America lacks enforcement jurisdiction over Terra assets in Latin America and remonstrated Goldman/Peppertree lawyers for “failing to do their homework” on the practicalities in this regard.  The victors in the arbitration were left to seek more practical ways whereby the US courts might exert enforcement (of which below).

Mr Gaitan has been “naive”

Meanwhile, Jorge Gaitan’s predicament after some eight months in jail has seen a marked turn for the worse, providing further ammunition for allegations that from the outset he was being funded  by Peppertree/Goldman Sachs primarily in order to manipulate his cooperation.

His new problems started right after the complaining shareholders won their victorious award of £354 million last March (the value of Terra’s entire share of the combined joint venture – in effect a takeover).  The ruling was upheld by the District Court in August.

From that point complaints by Jorge Gaitan’s local lawyers started to emerge that they were no longer being paid for the invoices they were sending in to Peppertree and Goldman Sachs. The prominent Guatemalan lawyer, Ana Lucia Alejos Botran, is now publicly revealing on social media that her bills have not been met since April 2025 with some $700,ooo now outstanding. It is a telling date.

Alejos Botran resigned in July and it has been reported that Gaitan’s subsequent legal counsel has also started to complain at lack of payment and that Gaitan himself has been issuing desperate demands blaming his lawyers and ‘those behind them’ for failing to prioritise his release.

It has raised the suspicion that now Goldman Sachs and Peppertree have secured the rulings that they want, Mr Gaitan suits them better behind bars and silenced, while they work to take over Continental Towers once and for all through the enforcement of the arbitration judgement.

According to available evidence, the company lawyers Adam Schachter and Mr Dechamps have confirmed this new reluctance to keep paying by the claimants, after previous years of funding Jorge Gaitan’s lifestyle (he moved to New York in 2022) and his litigation work.

When questioned by Sarawak Report in October, Mr Schachter had denied any involvement whatsoever in those payments to Mr Gaitan, responding:
“The allegations … are categorically false. I can confirm that neither I nor my law firm have ever provided any funds—directly or indirectly—to Mr. Gaitán or his personal lawyers“.

However, following a highly-charged phone conversation in December between Mr Schacter, Mr Dechamps, Ms Echaverria (now on bail) and Ms Alejos Botran (details of which have been released to Sarawak Report) we have a clearer picture of Mr Schachter’s role in these payment issues and of the present situation through his own words.

Explaining that he has been at the front line of the process and in regular contact with the “people cutting the cheques” at Peppertree, Schachter revealed there has indeed been a change of policy.

Blaming the high level of fees being charged, Schachter said that whilst Peppertree’s lawyers, with whom he was in regular discussion, were generally willing to meet bills, the legal teams at Goldman Sachs (which was sharing the payments sent directly to the legal firms’ accounts) had been less enthusiastic. Schachter explained that Peppertree always wanted to be in “lockstep” with Goldman Sachs.

Whilst Schachter was very in favour of the payments continuing, he said, there had been a very concerning development some six months previously (i.e. May/June) when he, as the neutral Continental Towers company lawyer, received a call from his regular legal contacts at Peppertree saying that they and Goldman Sachs had decided it was time to halt the ‘advancement process’ regarding the bills outstanding since April.

Mr Jean Paul Dechamps added there were pragmatic reasons underlying this change of heart in that despite the substantial award for damages the two parties were aware that the immediate chances of getting their money were remote (given the assets had been frozen pending rulings from the Latin American courts). Therefore, he explained, those companies reasonably wanted to “limit the expenses of the last four years”.

Mr Schachter claimed in the conversation that he had managed to change Peppertree’s mind and that they agreed to continue paying.  However, according to public social media posts by Ana Lucia Alejos Botran in January, the bills have still not been met.

Mr Dechamps then articulated that perhaps Mr Gaitan had been “naive” in his ongoing expectations, particularly since the bank and its allies were now hopeful that the threats to arrest Jorge Hernandez in the United States might finally get him to hand over his assets. One participant on the call recollects his remarks:

“Sometimes I think Jorge [Gaitan] has been quite naive… in really behaving as if these corporations, you know, have a heart and feelings. Unfortunately, they don’t listen. The people he deals with, yes, but as you know, people can be disposed of in an instant.
So, it’s a super complicated situation because there’s a lot of affection for Jorge, a lot of understanding of his situation, but at the end of the day, you have a bank and you also have a company, and, you know, one that was just bought by another [Peppertree was bought over by TPG May 2025]. So, none of this is for you or us to worry about, but I think that right now everyone’s view is that Jorge has to continue [as a silenced CEO].
There have been some signs recently from the Hernández family. They’ve agreed, for example, to have a bank appointed to sell the company. I think that’s a direct consequence of the pressure Kaplan is putting on him. The case in the United States is going very badly for Jorge Hernández, and for Jorge Hernández, not being able to return to the United States. You know how it is for Latin American magnates.  It’s the playground they like to go to.“

In which case, it appears that Jorge Gaitan has been hung out to dry, stuck in jail and silenced, whilst TPG (a close multi-faceted partner of Goldman Sachs) and its banking ally now set about pressuring and extracting the New York award, itself equivalent to the entire value of Henandez’s stake in the company.

Request To Order BVI To Cede Terra’s Shares

Contemporaneous with these revealing statements by the ‘neutral lawyers’ representing Continental Towers, the self-same claimant shareholders were processing a second attempt to gain enforcement through New York.

Just before Christmas, a request was made for the South District Court to order that the authorities in the British Virgin Islands, where Continental Towers is incorporated, should hand over all Terra Tower’s shares in the company (which ultimately hold its numerous assets in Latin America) to Peppertree/Goldman Sachs.

There is precedent, they argue, under reciprocal enforcement arrangements, for the tiny off-shore island to comply, thereby neatly by-passing the jurisdictions of all the countries which are investigating charges of fraud by Peppertree directors, Jorge Gaitan and others.

Should, the BVI stand up to US legal might there would be clear consequences for the shadowy tax haven. Judge Kaplan’s decision on this so-called Petition for Relief is believed to be due imminently.

His ruling will be made with the allegations of corporate raiding, fraud, breach of fiduciary duties and seduction of corrupted employees, made by Terra Towers, all yet to be heard or tested in any way: either by discovery, the submission of evidence or the hearing of witnesses as repeatedly requested by the Terra Towers’ legal teams in the name of fair and normal practice.

Accusations about biased legal systems, subject to powerful local manipulation, inevitably look to continue in both directions.

Malaysia has played its part in making its most senior public official, ex-Prime Minister Najib Razak (dubbed Malaysian Official One by the US Department of Justice), accountable for the massive thefts from 1MDB.

Yet ,what about those who enabled Najib, from the US banking and legal community in particular?

Sadly, 2025 ended with a far less edifying scenario in that respect, with the paltry sentence of just two years (subject to being shortened for good behaviour) handed down to the only senior non-Malaysian figure from Goldman Sachs to face charges in the matter, the Southeast Asia boss Tim Leissner.

Only his Malaysian subordinate, Roger Ng (now giving evidence to investigators in KL) received any real punishment, a ten year sentence, for the active collaboration of this powerful bank, which netted record fees ($600 million plus) and therefore record bonuses for all its top personnel.

Likewise, a full decade after the fraud was exposed, Malaysia has struggled to bring to book the transatlantic law firm White & Case for its own key role in providing the legal cover and assurances which were vital to carrying out the thefts.

Legal Enablers

It is at last made known that law enforcers across international borders have begun criminal investigations into the role of White & Case, which from 2009 through 2011 first restructured the fraudulent entity PetroSaudi, incorporating new off-shore ‘subsidiaries’ that provided a false picture of its assets, and then concocted a bogus loan between those subsidiaries as a first step to disguise the theft of an eventual $2.83 billion dollars that was ploughed by 1MDB into the so-called joint venture, cum loan, cum investment, cum unit trust purchase.

All the iterations of this fraud, until well into 2011, were conducted under the auspices and with the collaborati0on of White & Case as the advisors to PetroSaudi. The highly suspicious nature of these transactions appears to have been overlooked by the law firm: surely at best a staggering failure of due diligence given the consequences of the misinformation provided to 1MDB?

For example, when 1MDB’s lawyers Wong & Partners requested details, just hours before the initial billion dollars was released, of the account into which $700 million was being detoured from the supposed joint venture, White & Case confirmed that it was registered in the name of  PetroSaudi.

The explanation given was that the enormous sum represented the repayment of a loan made by one PetroSaudi subsidiary to another, an obligation that had been written into the joint venture contract which White & Case had been highly instrumental framing as PetroSaudi’s lawyers.

This provision was allegedly justified on the basis that PetroSaudi had for its part injected valuable oil assets worth $2.9 billion into the joint venture.

Except, the account did not belong to PetroSaudi it belonged to Good Star Limited owned by Najib’s proxy, the fraudster Jho Low, to whom all that money went.  Moreover, no loan had ever actually been made, and the ‘valuable’ oil assets were not PetroSaudi’s to inject: neither were they valuable.  They were in fact of zero value,  owing to an international boundary dispute that had frozen any foreseeable prospect of exploiting the purported concession in the Caspian Sea.

White & Case was perfectly positioned to be aware of the truth in all of the above matters.  In particular Sarawak Report has ascertained:

a) Having drawn up the most recent representations of the company’s international structure, following its engagement in the incorporation of new subsidiaries and transference of alleged assets, White & Case knew full well that Good Star Limited did NOT feature within that company group structure.

At the very least the law firm should have confirmed the official ownership of the account into which the $700 million was to be paid and required absolute proof from PetroSaudi’s directors and the Seychelles company registry before falsely informing Wong & Partners, as they did by email, that the account belonged to a subsidiary of PetroSaudi.

b) As PetroSaudi’s lawyers, White & Case were closely involved in the negotiations with the Canadian company Buried Hill from which PetroSaudi had obtained a short-term option to potentially buy the rights to its ‘Serdar’ oil concession in the Caspian Sea.

Nonetheless, the law firm allowed their clients to misrepresent this option as a genuine PetroSaudi asset in order to extract the massively advantageous terms obtained under its joint venture agreement with 1MDB. Those terms included the agreement (which never received board approval) that 1MDB would repay the fictitious $700 million loan allegedly made by one PetroSaudi subsidiary to another.

White & Case were aware no loan was ever made by PetroSaudi International to the 1MDB Petro Saudi limited(later used for the joint venture) as officially claimed.  The latter had not even set up its bank account to receive the money on the date it was allegedly made on September 25th 2011.  Correspondence with the bank concerned from White & Case makes clear the law firm knew this fact. Indeed, the US Department of Justice has confirmed the account was only  opened on September 30th after the money was allegedly already ‘returned’ (removed from the billion dollar ‘investment’ made by 1MDB).

Emails prove the firm knew that the legal letters drawn up by White & Case confirming the payment and then the repayment on behalf of PetroSaudi were exchanged simply to “legitimise” the pre-payment by 1MDB.

c) White & Case were also involved in the moves initiated by PetroSaudi to immediately dissolve the option agreement with Buried Hill within days of the 1MDB deal and the arrival of $300 million of Malaysia’s public money into its company accounts.

By this point the duplicity of the deal, which was entirely based on the alleged asset that PetroSaudi was now severing all potential claim to, ought surely to have become abundantly clear to White & Case.  Yet the law firm continued to act and provide cover for this fraudulent client.

“Briefly, we can value the Argentinean assets at around $50-$75m and the Turkmenistan asset at around .. $1b-$1.5b after the border dispute is resolved. ..  If we do the deal we want with the Canadian company that currently owns the asset in Turkmenistan, we will also pick up a block in the Gambia but the value of this unclear at this point”  [Patrick Mahony laying out PetroSaudi’s ‘assets’ to Jho Low at the very start of the planned fraud in August 2009]

d) Despite later denials made to Sarawak Report, it is also abundantly clear that relevant personnel at White & Case knew that the overseers of the joint venture deal were secretly Jho Low and his personal Malaysian lawyer Tiffany Heah.

Emails show that the original drafting behind the joint venture agreement was prepared by Heah and Low before being sent on to PetroSaudi’s Investment Officer, Patrick Mahony. Mahony in turn sent the proposals to White & Case to be refined and formalised into the joint venture contract.  There is no question from these emails that relevant parties at the law firm knew this was the case: from this it ought surely to have deduced that PetroSaudi was acting as a willing front for Jho Low rather than negotiating a genuine deal with the official representatives from 1MDB.

Indeed, when the 1MDB management team was flown over to the UK to negotiate and sign the hastily concocted joint venture contract, just days before the deal was concluded, two adjacent rooms were hired within White & Case’s own offices in London. The second room was to accommodate Jho Low and his team who oversaw the events separated only by the thin paneling as Patrick Mahony and his team shuttled between the two sets of players.

The knowledge of the law firm about the real state of affairs is confirmed by further emails sent just after those negotiations, in which Mahony required that White & Case should allow Tiffany Heah access to the law firm’s London offices to perform a supervisory check on the paperwork so that Jho Low could then signal to the prime minister of Malaysia that all was satisfactory for him to sign off on the agreement.

White & Case acceded to this request. Therefore, they effectively knew who was orchestrating the whole affair and would have known that the later denials by 1MDB, Jho Low and PetroSaudi, saying that Jho Low had no involvement in these matters were lies.

e) Within weeks of the remaining $300 million entering the PetroSaudi Joint Venture account, White & Case became engaged in negotiating on behalf of their client to invest that cash not in the purported agreed joint venture project in Turkmenistan (which was both hopeless and also in the process of being exited by their client) but in PetroSaudi’s actual investment ambitions in Venezuela.

These investments had nothing to do with 1MDB – they were not discussed with or controlled by the Malaysian fund and the profits were due to PetroSaudi only – despite all the investment having come from 1MDB, supposedly for a joint venture elsewhere.

White & Case, despite being entirely in the know about the joint venture contract and the money that had entered from Malaysia, nonetheless continued to engage in the management of PetroSaudi’s activities in Venezuela.

f) White & Case continued to act for PetroSaudi in assisting the changes to the arrangements in 2010 that enabled the joint venture to be allegedly dissolved before 1MDB had to file its first accounts, which would have inevitably revealed the $700 million theft.

White & Case experts were drafted in to help instead frame the Murabaha (‘Islamic’) loan arrangement that exited 1MDB from the joint venture and turned the arrangement into a loan to PetroSaudi instead.

The revised deal furthermore extended that loan to allow the company to borrow a further $833 million from the fund over the ensuing year. $330 million of that money went again directly into the bogus Good Star account; much of the remainder went indirectly, via PetroSaudi, to buy out Jho Low’s holding in UBG.

Emails show that relevant personnel at White & Case were aware the ‘Islamic’ loan had been illegally back-dated by 1MDB (the purpose was to avoid detailing the joint venture in the public accounts) and that the provisions of the loan comprised dishonest ‘window dressing’ in terms of being Islamic, which they were not.

1MDB has already filed a $1.83 billion civil case against White & Case (the entire sum injected into the joint venture) for what it clearly believes amounts to a gross failure to ensure its client had provided honest information during the several stages of negotiations where the law firm had acted for them.

As courts have now ruled, PetroSaudi defrauded 1MDB in a conspiracy with Jho Low and Najib. Yet, White & Case failed to restrain them or report them, despite the glaring evidence and their own enabling role. Instead, the law firm allowed itself to be used to give credibility to a fraudulent deal.

The news that law enforcers in both Malaysia and the UK are now also investigating criminal allegations confirms they believe there is sufficient evidence to suggest that decision makers at White & Case were indeed aware of the dishonesty at play.

‘Financial Enabler Number 1’ – Goldman Sachs

A decade on there remain equal concerns about the role of top decision makers at the top US bank Goldman Sachs. The US Department of Justice played a crucial role in exposing the outrageous $6.5 billion bond fraud that was separately facilitated by the bank in the second stage of looting from 1MDB.

Thanks to the arrest of Southeast Asia boss Tim Leissner and his agreement to provide a full confession the investigation obtained comprehensive details of the crime which have been used to expose Najib, Jho Low, several 1MDB and IPIC/Aabar sovereign fund officials and Leissner’s own deputy Roger Ng.

However, whilst these have either been punished or remain on the run, no effort has been made by the US law enforcers to bring other senior figures at the bank criminally to book. Yet, a review of Leissner’s own public statement to the court back in 2018 provides damning evidence that this Goldman Sachs conspirator was ready to expose senior people at the bank who were fully aware of the fraud and the pay-offs to political players. This is what he said:

During the course of the conspiracy, I conspired with other employees and agents of Goldman Sachs very much in line of its culture of Goldman Sachs to conceal facts from certain compliance and legal employees of Goldman Sachs, including the fact that Jho Low, who is identified as Co-Conspirator Number 1 in the information, was acting as a intermediary for on behalf of Goldman Sachs, 1MDB, and Malaysian and Abu Dhabi officials.

As stated in the information, on one occasion in 2012, I told a committee at Goldman Sachs that Jho Low was not involved in one of the bond transactions. This was not true. I knew that concealing Jho Low’s involvement as an intermediary was contrary to Goldman Sachs’s stated internal policies and procedures.

I and several other employees of Goldman Sachs at the time also concealed that we knew that Jho Low was promising and paying bribes and kickbacks to foreign officials to obtain and retain 1MDB business for Goldman Sachs, for the benefit of Goldman Sachs and myself, and using some of the proceeds of the 1MDB bonds to do so. I knew that this was contrary to Goldman Sachs’s stated policies and procedures.

As a result of these bribes and kickbacks, and in movement of the funds through the bribes and kickbacks, Goldman Sachs received substantial business from 1MDB. The three bond deals and related transactions resulted in substantial fees and revenues for Goldman Sachs, of which and in many cases, it was very proud of at the time. In addition, I received large year-end bonuses as an employee.

Despite these several powerful references to senior co-conspirators at Goldman Sachs back in 2018 the US law enforcers appear to have done nothing to hold these corrupt financiers accountable, allowing them to walk away with enormous bonuses made from defrauding Malaysia.

In the meantime, civil suits reported by this website have spelt out how the most senior people at the bank chose to ignore and ostracise those partners and personnel who warned that the 1MDB bond deals were plainly corrupt and should not be further engaged in by the bank.  Indeed, the CEO himself had met with Jho Low, who had already been Red Flagged by the bank’s compliance arms as a high risk individual to be avoided at all cost, at least three times.

Yet, when the DOJ concluded its dealings over Goldman’s role it chose to take money in lieu of prosecuting the bank, exacting a record $2.9 billion fine as part of a so-called Deferred Prosecution Agreement with the bank.

The shameful deal, which doubtless earned several career boosting plaudits for prosecutors involved and a huge injection of resources for their department, has effectively let a swathe of clearly dishonest individuals off  Scott free in return for a tiny slice of the annual profits made by the bank – a dent in the the Christmas bonus in lieu of ending up behind bars.

The US anti-kleptocracy initiative was disbanded by DOJ’s present Attorney General Pam Bondi as one of the very first actions of the incoming Trump administration in 2025.

It would be shameful and retrograde if, having made an example of Najib and some others, guilty parties from professions that hold a vital role of trust in keeping corruption at bay should simply be let off to service future kleptocrats – themselves no longer the target of any scrutiny.

Anyone who has enjoyed living in a healthy democracy, governed by the rule of law, will appreciate the benefits for the rights, freedoms and security of the community as a whole.

Equally, they will understand that for the system to work no one person or group of people should consider themselves above the laws that govern everybody else nor entitled to grab huge shares of the national wealth to the detriment of the health, well-being and education of others – and ultimately their disempowerment.

Malaysia as a nation has proven that this is the path it plans to follow, as the firm but sober verdict passed against its former rogue prime minister was greeted this week with an overall nod of national acceptance.

It was not easy to bring such a powerful, wealthy and politically connected figure to book, whilst following all the due processes of the law. In this case it took a full seven years against a well-funded legal pushback, special pleading and behind the scenes manoeuvrings.

It also took a learned and objective judge with the courage and the freedom to examine the evidence to bring justice in this case. Crucial as well was the testimony of 50 brave prosecution witnesses: ordinary people who were caught up in the decision by the country’s most powerful man to steal billions of ringgit to strengthen his personal authority and fuel a lavish lifestyle at the expense of those who had trusted him to govern in the public interest.

The judge concluded the evidence was overwhelming and found Najib Razak guilty on all 25 charges brought against him on grounds of criminal abuse of power and money laundering, relating to 1MDB alone and the $4.5 billion of public money stolen from the bogus development fund.

Extraordinary fine that speaks volumes

However, it was as much the extraordinary fine as the 15 years sentence in total that tells the real story about the dangers presented by this now finally fallen politician.

Judge Collin Lawrence Sequerah ordered that Najib must pay back an eye-watering RM11.38 billion ($2.8bn) of the stolen monies or else expect to serve a further 10 years in jail beyond that 15 years.  Meanwhile, another court has ruled null and void the attempted claim that a half-baked  ‘royal pardon’ might allow Najib to serve his sentence from the comfort of his own various homes.

This is a crucial demand, given so much of the fear stirred by this world-beating kleptocrat – and his remaining power – has come from his perceived ongoing command over much of the huge wealth he stole and appears to continue to have access to whilst held in jail.

This is money obtained not only from the 1MDB thefts, but from defence and other contracts:  a French court has determined that Najib was the beneficiary of no less than €114 million from the Scorpene submarine kickbacks alone.

Then, there were the side-dealings organised by his wife, Rosmah Mansor, who relentlessly sought further kickbacks for slews of contracts signed off by her husband, quite apart from her own direct involvements in 1MDB.

The couple’s fixer, the fugitive Jho Low, whom Judge Sequerah determined was indeed Najib’s proxy carrying out his orders, is on record confirming that Rosmah acquired a stash of diamonds worth half a billion dollars as her nest egg to fall back on.

Rosmah was let off tax evasion charges just earlier this month and has stretched out an appeal over other crimes of public theft, for which she was convicted, for several years.  So, now the court has emblematically left this couple with a choice: to find and return the money from whence it is hidden, or else, prepare for Najib to spend the rest of his days in jail.

This is the right choice for the nation.  No one should take pleasure from the fall of a public figure, however the country needs protection from a clear and present danger in a couple who combined political power with the ability to buy the destruction of all that stood in their way.

Malaysians can well remember the fear inflicted by the pair as they sought to defend their interests, wielding deep pockets and tentacles that resulted in the dismissals, disappearances, deaths and incarcerations of those who crossed them, seemingly enjoying impunity over the hand they played in such events.

As the going got tough with the exposure of 1MDB, armed rallies were conjured up to intimidate those who called for the rule of law, freedom of speech and reform, whilst key potential witnesses mysteriously met their ends.  The original whistleblower, Xavier Justo, was arrested and thrown into a Bangkok jail thanks to the diplomatic ties that Najib was so well placed to abuse with false allegations by his co-conspirators.

Even in the UK, the editor of this website which published so many of the facts that brought Najib down, was subject to expensively funded harassment: surveillance teams in London; black PR campaigns; hackers and a dozen legal firms were commissioned to cause maximum harm. It was all small beer to a man who had stolen billions, and it was designed to silence the truth and subdue a nation.

Such malign wealth and power, criminally acquired, represents the biggest threat to democracy, the rule of law and to the well-being of a nation state.

Strong institutions and tough and independent judges, alongside brave individuals backed by a community that cherishes its freedoms, are what are needed to stand up to them.

In this, Malaysia has succeeded with this sentencing.

It came very close, given Najib and his cronies proved willing to even surrender the independence of their nation into the grasp of its neighbouring super-power, in return for a bargain to bail him out of his crimes and keep quiet about it.

In November 2016, this rogue prime minister signed a deal to obtain a cheap multi-billion ringgit loan, supposedly to fund Belt & Road infrastructure projects.  In reality, those projects had been deliberately inflated by 100%, through an agreement between both parties, to enable Chinese state construction companies to funnel back half the cash through Chinese state banks and intermediaries, so that Najib could pay the debts owed by 1MDB on all the billions of dollars that he was pretending had not been stolen.

With China as the custodian of his dirty secrets Najib could never have made another independent decision for the benefit of his country.  Therefore, little surprise that at the same time as the bail-out deal a new strategic defence policy was agreed that favoured China. Likewise, a swathe of further projects were inked to integrate Malaysia’s economy into the wider Chinese economic orbit.

Thanks to remaining free information sources (including Sarawak Report via online media), Malaysians saw through the subterfuge.  All that stolen money failed to rescue Najib from electoral defeat. Meanwhile, the country owes a great deal to those who stood up to their misguided leader and to those brave law enforcers who brought him to face justice.

Like every other democratic nation, Malaysia remains challenged by such corrupted politicians and over-wealthy, over-powerful figures willing to put themselves before their country’s interests. However, in this extreme and important case the public interest has been done and is seen to have been done. The message that no one is above the law has been sent.

It leaves the country safer and with more prosperous prospects as it looks forward to 2026.

Be ever vigilant.

The waves from 1MDB are still rippling out over the finance industry. It was the scam where the ‘untouchables’ and their banking facilitators got caught.

But look how long it takes to bring these players to account. It was cited in the Singapore court, where 1MDB liquidators are suing Standard Chartered for $2.7 billion, that between 2009 and 2013 the bank “permitted over 100 intrabank transfers that helped conceal the flow of stolen funds” and chose to overlook obvious red flags in the process.

Yet, the bank, which had sought to get the case struck out, will appeal the ruling.

Meanwhile, former PM Najib Razak will finally receive a verdict on December 22nd over his own 1MDB case that has lasted seven years, thanks to delays and challenges that often ranged from the indulgent to the absurd.

In what seems unlikely to have been a coincidence, that date was brought forward from January meaning that the verdict will be issued on the exact same day that a separate decision is due to be made over Najib’s long-running application to convert his existing prison sentence (for separate multi-million ringgit thefts from SRC) to house arrest.

The proposed VVIP upgrade (Najib already enjoys luxury private quarters at Kajang jail) was controversially advocated behind the scenes by his family friend, the Pahang Sultan, during the closing hours of his tenure as King of Malaysia.

The scene seems set, therefore, for a package deal to combine what would appear from the facts presented to be an almost inevitable guilty verdict over the world’s largest recorded theft with a cosy retirement offer.

Najib has two rounds of appeals anyway, which he will certainly use to grind away at whatever sentence he might receive. There is plenty of money still for lawyers, clearly.

Meanwhile,  mothers banged up for shoplifting for their hungry kids and petty drug users continue to sweat it out in harsh conditions, having received swift and summary justice in lower courts.

Indeed, thanks to exposing the whole affair, this writer received a two year sentence after a half day magistrate’s hearing in a local court in Terengganu, without notification even of the trial.

Meanwhile, the details that have emerged from the Singapore court of the charges faced by Standard Chartered highlight, as if anyone needed reminding, the levels of greed and graft involved over 1MDB on the part of Najib and his wife.

The bank managed the accounts of three offshore companies used by Jho Low to funnel funds stolen from the proceeds of the Goldman Sachs bond issues raised for 1MDB – a matter revealed as long ago as 2016.

Alsen Chance Holdings Limited, Blackstone Asia Real Estate Partners Limited, and Brightstone Jewellery Limited between them were used to transfer over $150 million to Najib’s personal account in KL and then further payments totalling over $135 million in luxury purchases for his wife Rosmah, including jewellery, watches and handbags.

The same accounts were used by Jho to finance his outreach into America’s celebrity set on behalf of the ruling Malaysia couple.  However, this looting was separate to payments via other financial institutions such as Julius Baer who facilitated the payment of $170m diverted from SRC into the same Najib account, and in advance of the massive $680 million payment in advance of the 2013 election, paid via another Jho Low account (Tanore Finance Corporation) at Falcon Bank in Singapore.

The role of Rosmah Mansor in this scheme has been revealed to all. She was Jho Low’s pampered patroness who pushed him and his schemes past Najib whilst she intervened in government business to get her cut.  Keeping a sufficient supply of trophies and trinkets flowing her way to suffice her voracious appetite was a major preoccupation of Jho Low’s criminal enterprise.

Yet, the execution of Rosmah’s own guilty verdict concerning just one documented example of her predatory behaviour, the looting of power supply funding designated for schools in Sarawak, lies frozen in apparent permafrost.

She was sentenced in September 2022 for soliciting a bribe of 187.5 million ringgit ($41.80 million), of which she received 6.5 million ringgit for arranging the contract – it had taken four years to reach that verdict after the matter was first exposed by Sarawak Report in June 2018.

Ever since, she has delayed the enforcement of her ten year sentence by tactics such as demanding the recusal of the  judge who found her guilty.

In September, an Appeal Court panel rejected her appeal against the judge. She will now doubtless appeal the judgement then take that to the Federal Court.  Chances are her husband will be out long before, or even if, she goes in.

Whilst 1MDB money is still missing, Rosmah and Najib have not run short of cash to fight their endless battles and the banks and other professionals who acted as willing hires are likewise fighting every inch of the way to avoid accountability themselves.