Lawyer Tan Sri Muhammad Shafee Abdullah alleged today that his client Datuk Seri Najib Razak was a victim of fugitive businessman Low Taek Jho’s conspiracy.
“We know our client is innocent because our client is a victim. I dare tell you that he is a victim of conspiracy of Jho Low and gang,” he told the press at the Kuala Lumpur Court Complex here, referring to Najib.
“So give him a chance. You have to prove that he is part of Jho Low’s conspiracy,” he added, directing the remark to the prosecution.
Earlier today, during Najib’s corruption trial over RM42 million of ex-1MDB unit SRC International Sdn Bhd’s funds at the High Court, Najib’s lawyers had sought for communication records between Low and AmBank officer Joanna Yu Ging Ping that were seized by Bank Negara Malaysia investigators.
A Finance Minister is supposed to manage the nation’s finances through official channels and institutions, yet Najib lied continuously when he claimed this unofficial advisor (Jho Low) had nothing to do with 1MDB following the setting up of the fund after May 2009.
Pictures exist of Jho Low together with the fund’s first ‘joint venture’ partners from PetroSaudi and Najib at the time that project was launched in September 2009.
Copious further evidence shows that Jho Low was secretly involved every step of the way over each and every detail managing that ‘joint venture’ and also all 1MDB’s later activities until the moment he was exposed by Sarawak Report in 2015 and immediately fled Malaysia.
So Najib claims he is a victim, but he was also a serial liar over the role of Jho Low, whom he so belatedly alleges he was duped by. Why?
For a victim this man, who was also Prime Minister, was nothing if not powerful. So, likewise, the moment he realised the money entering his accounts was from SRC (back in Juuly 2015) he ought to have issued a Red Notice for Jho Low and launched a wholescale investigation admitting a horrendous error.
Instead, he allowed Jho Low to go off to China and negotiate a hundred percent inflation of the cost of the East Coast Rail link (at enormous further cost on top) …. in order to hide repayments of the missing 1MDB money. Again, why?
And why did he continue to act with bad faith after all the facts and figures were exposed by the FBI and many other international investigators in 2016, as he refused to acknowledge what he is now forced to admit (following election defeat) namely wrongdoing at 1MDB?
Najib denied right up till the election that there had been misappropriation from 1MDB, that Jho Low was involved or that money had been misdirected into his own accounts. Given 1MDB smelt to high heaven and the world was investigating it, this simply won’t wash under the category of being “duped”.
The ultimate irony is that Najib’s present defence is essentially that he was an incredibly stupid and unenquiring man, of the sort who ought never to have been put in charge of RM10 of someone else’s money let alone the country’s entire wealth. And yet day after day Malaysians are con-currently being treated to his endless supercilious lecturing about various other aspects of the economy, which he claims he could be running better than his successors.
If your best defence is that you are an idiot, who paid not the slightest attention to glaring evidence of misappropriation linked to your own accounts and failed to probe missing billions acquired by you when alerted to wrong-doing at 1MDB, then it is best not to try and create the opposite impression at the very same time by constantly posing as a top economist and money manager on every other topic under the sun.