KUALA LUMPUR, March 14 — The High Court judge who had heard the trial against former prime minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak over the misappropriation of RM42 million from 1Malaysia Development Berhad’s (1MDB) former subsidiary SRC International Sdn Bhd should have disqualified himself from hearing the case, Najib’s lawyer claimed today.

Najib’s lead defence lawyer Tan Sri Muhammad Shafee Abdullah claimed that Datuk Mohd Nazlan Mohd Ghazali — who was the High Court judge hearing and deciding on the SRC trial — should have disclosed his previous job in 2012 as Maybank’s company secretary and group general counsel.

Nazlan was the judge who had heard Najib’s SRC trial at the High Court which had started in April 2019 and who delivered the guilty verdict in July 2020 against Najib.

Shafee’s highlighting of Nazlan’s previous role comes more than one and a half years after the High Court’s decision was delivered.

Shafee claimed to have newly discovered Nazlan’s past role in Maybank just a few days ago, and said Najib’s lawyers will be filing a new application to highlight this to the Federal Court.

Najib is currently seeking to appeal against his conviction and fine and jail sentence in the SRC case at the Federal Court.

"Yes, we are going to put in an application because we just discovered this only three days ago,” Shafee told reporters when met at the Kuala Lumpur court complex.

Shafee said Najib’s lawyers would not be raising this tomorrow when the Federal Court hears their application to add in purported new evidence for the SRC appeal but said they would file a separate and new application to add in more evidence in the form of Nazlan’s previous Maybank job.

"Not tomorrow. After tomorrow, we are going to put in another application of additional evidence, because we are discovering things every day. Because people are fed up, people are leaking,” Shafee said.

Shafee claimed that Nazlan — who is now a Court of Appeal judge — should not have heard the SRC trial, due to the latter’s past role as company secretary and group general counsel for Maybank in 2012 when the bank had lent RM4.17 billion to 1MDB to help finance the company’s acquisition of independent power producer Tanjong Energy Holdings Sdn Bhd (TEHSB).

Shafee claimed that Nazlan was the head of Maybank’s corporate and legal services department then, and further claimed 1MDB later was unable to repay the loan given by Maybank.

"He would have formed certain opinion especially when the company failed to pay because the money was hijacked by Jho Low, management and Jho Low pakat (cooperated) took the money out, all the big chunks of the bonds was siphoned out to Jho Low. The question is if you have formed some kind of opinion about the company — the company mishandled itself, how can you hear a wholly-owned subsidiary of 1MDB, which is SRC?

"Nazlan, the judge who heard the case in SRC, he should have disqualified himself, because he will be a witness here. If the prosecution doesn’t call him, we will call him,” Shafee claimed, referring to Najib’s separate 1MDB trial which is being heard before High Court judge Datuk Collin Lawrence Sequerah.

Tania Scivetti, another lawyer representing Najib, said judges have an obligation to disclose potential conflict of interest and claimed that Nazlan had the opportunities to do so.

Scivetti said the first opportunity would have been when Nazlan was assigned as the High Court judge that would be hearing the SRC trial, and that the second opportunity would have been when Najib was charged in the 1MDB trial in September 2018.

SRC is a company that was formed in January 2011, and came under 1MDB’s ownership in August 2011.

About six months later in February 2012, the Finance Ministry-owned Ministry of Finance (MOF) Incorporated took over as owner of SRC. This means SRC would have been a subsidiary of 1MDB for only a brief few months.

In July 2020, the High Court found Najib guilty of all seven charges in the SRC trial, and sentenced him to millions of ringgit in fine and to imprisonment.

Najib appealed to the Court of Appeal, which in December 2021 decided to maintain Najib’s conviction and sentencing.

No hearing date has been fixed yet for Najib’s actual SRC appeal before the Federal Court, and Najib’s lawyers had previously indicated that they intend to bring in a Queen’s Counsel from the UK to represent him in the SRC appeal. Queen’s Counsel is a term typically referring to leading senior lawyers in the UK who handle more complex cases.