Former Goldman Sachs director Roger Ng was convicted early Friday on all counts related to the infamous 1MDB scandal in which $6.5 billion in bond deals were underwritten by the investment bank, mostly driven by bribes and other illegal funding.
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After two months of trial and nearly 16 hours of deliberation, a federal jury in Brooklyn convicted Ng of conspiracy to violate the anti-bribery provisions of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, conspiracy to violate the FCPA by circumventing Goldman’s internal accounting controls and money laundering conspiracy.
During the trial prosecutors argued that Ng, former Goldman partner Tim Leissner and Malaysian financier Jho Low executed a plot to mislead the banking giant into backing three bond transactions from the Malaysian sovereign wealth fund 1MDB.
The prosecution alleges that Low was the mastermind of the scheme and used his government influence and corrupt government contacts in Southeast Asia and the Middle East to fund the bond deals by way of bribes and kickbacks. He is alleged to have embezzled $1.42 billion from 1MDB. His current whereabouts are publicly unknown and he is considered to be a fugitive by the United States.
Goldman profited approximately $600 million in fees and revenue for underwriting the transactions, with Leissner and Ng netting tens of millions of dollars for bringing Goldman such lucrative business.
Leissner pled guilty to his charges and cooperated with the government’s investigation. He testified in Ng’s trial that was intimately involved in the scheme and placed him at a 2012 London meeting with Low, Leissner and others in which Low laid out what government officials — including the former prime minister of Malaysia and an influential sheikh in Abu Dhabi — had to be bribed to ensure the bond deals went through.
However, Leissner was harshly cross-examined over his admissions to extensive lies spanning years, in both his professional and personal lives.
Under a deferred prosecution agreement signed in 2020, Goldman agreed to pay $2.9 billion to resolve the U.S. government’s criminal investigation into their involvement in the 1MDB scandal. The investment bank also agreed to cough up an additional $3.9 billion to settle the Malaysian government’s criminal case.
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