1MDB charges: What's next for Najib?

The criminal court will decide tomorrow if Najib Abdul Razak must answer 25 counts of abuse of power and money laundering involving RM2.27 billion from 1MDB.

The Kuala Lumpur High Court end-of-prosecution ruling will come on the heels of the former prime minister's statement last week where he apologised over the 1MDB debacle while still maintaining his innocence.

If judge Collin Lawrence Sequerah finds the prosecutors failed to establish a case that Najib needs to answer, then the accused would be discharged and acquitted from the four abuse of power charges and 21 money laundering counts.

However, if the court finds that the prosecution succeeded in establishing prima facie (answerable case), then it would order the former finance minister to enter his defence.

Three options

If Najib needs to enter his defence, he would be given three options to respond.

The first is to take the witness stand to give sworn evidence, the second is to give an unsworn statement from the dock or opt to remain silent.

The first option allows the prosecution to cross-examine Najib over his oral evidence, and the accused has the option of calling witnesses to testify for him during the defence stage of the trial.

The second option prevents prosecutors from cross-examining the accused's statement. However, under past practice, courts tended not to give much weight to or completely disregard such untested statements.

The third option of staying silent would open the way for the court to convict the accused.

The charges

For the four abuse of power charges, the former Pekan MP was accused of committing the offence at AmIslamic Bank Bhd’s Jalan Raja Chulan branch in Bukit Ceylon, Kuala Lumpur, between Feb 24, 2011, and Dec 19, 2014.

On the 21 money laundering counts, the 71-year-old was alleged to have perpetrated the offence at the same bank between March 22 and Aug 30, 2013.

The accused was first charged on Sept 20, 2018, and his trial began on Aug 28, 2019.

The prosecution closed its case on May 30 this year, six years after Najib’s first court date in this case.

Between Aug 19 and Oct 3, the proceedings were in the oral submission stage, which saw no witness testimonies.

This was because it only involved legal teams summing up whether the oral and documentary evidence implicates or exonerates Najib.

Fifty witnesses took the stand for the prosecution, among them 1MDB’s former CEOs Shahrol Azral Ibrahim Halmi and Mohd Hazem Abd Rahman, Najib’s former special officer Amhari Efendi Nazaruddin, and former Bank Negara governor Zeti Akhtar Aziz.

Prosecutors claimed that Najib received RM2.27 billion misappropriated from the troubled sovereign wealth fund between 2011 and 2014.

However, Najib’s legal team from the law firm Shafee & Co contended that he had neither knowledge nor involvement in wrongdoing, as he believed that the money was a donation from Saudi royalty.

The defence team contended that all embezzlements at the sovereign wealth fund were perpetrated by fugitive businessperson Low Taek Jho (Jho Low) and members of the fund’s management.

Besides highlighting Low and 1MDB management’s alleged culpability, the former finance minister’s legal team contended that the late King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia had promised financial donations to the accused.

The accused is relying on four letters allegedly from Arab royalty, which stated that the donations were given, with no strings attached, in recognition of his contribution to the Islamic world.

Najib’s defence team also pointed out that while US$681 million flowed into his two AmBank accounts in 2013, around US$620 million was returned to the sender later that year.

Serving time

Najib is serving a six-year jail sentence in a separate RM42 million SRC International corruption case.

Besides the RM2.27 billion 1MDB graft case, the former 1MDB's board of advisers chairperson faces several ongoing criminal court cases such as the RM6.6 billion International Petroleum Investment Company criminal breach of trust case, and a money laundering case involving RM27 million from SRC.

Najib had previously been discharged and acquitted in an abuse of power case involving 1MDB's audit report.

Counsel Muhammad Shafee Abdullah leads Najib's defence team.

The prosecution team comprised deputy public prosecutors Kamal Baharin Omar, Ahmad Akram Gharib, and Mohamad Mustaffa P Kunyalam, among others.

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