KUALA LUMPUR, Dec 10 — Datuk Seri Najib Razak today sought to discredit the prosecution’s star witness Jasmine Loo’s testimony that a 2014 letter — which was one of the letters he used to justify the billions entering his bank account as a Saudi donation — was only created in 2015.
Challenging Loo’s testimony on the purported 2014 Saudi donation letter, Najib said her retelling of what had happened was so “implausible that it could easily be mistaken for a scene from a Bollywood movie”.
Testifying in his trial involving 1Malaysia Development Berhad’s (1MDB) RM2 billion funds, Najib was referring to Loo’s account of events that took place at the business centre at the Mayfair Hotel in London in 2015.
Previously, Loo told the 1MDB trial that Low Taek Jho had asked her to meet there in 2015, and she arrived there to see three other individuals including Kee Kok Thiam and Ihsan Perdana Sdn Bhd (IPSB) managing director Datuk Shamsul Anwar Sulaiman.
Loo said Shamsul had asked Low for a solution as questions were being raised about funds in Najib’s accounts which was being linked to 1MDB, and that Low ordered Kee to prepare a letter from Saudi prince Prince Saud to say that the money deposited into Najib’s account were Saudi donations.
Loo had said she briefly went out with Low to discuss other matters, and came back into the same business centre room to see Kee preparing the draft for the donation letter dated 2014 from Prince Saud.
“To me, this entire narrative is more like a scene from a Bollywood movie than a credible sequence of events — in fact, so ludicrous it borders on humour, yet the prosecution presented her claim which is to be believed above the others whose contemporaneous recount of events supports my defence,” Najib claimed in the High Court and alleged that this shows a “malicious prosecution” against him.
In his 1MDB trial, Najib is facing criminal charges over his receiving of huge sums of money in his private AmIslamic bank account (RM60 million in 2011, RM90 million in 2012, US$681 million (RM2.08 billion) in 2013, and RM44.5 million in 2014). The prosecution says these funds belong to 1MDB.
But Najib is defending himself based on four letters purportedly promising donations from Saudi Arabia to him, and insists that all four alleged donation letters existed before 2015.
“These letters were central to my genuine and honest belief that the funds I received were donations as pledged by His Majesty King Abdullah,” he said, referring to the late Saudi ruler King Abdullah.
Najib claimed that various other prosecution witnesses — AmBank’s former managing director Cheah Tek Kuang, AmBank’s former banker Joanna Yu, former AmBank official Yap Wai Keat, AmIslamic’s Jalan Raja Chulan branch manager R. Uma Devi and former Bank Negara Malaysia governor Tan Sri Zeti Akhtar Aziz — had confirmed the donation letters existed before 2015.
Najib said the prosecution prefers to prioritise and fully accept Loo’s court testimony on the 2014 donation letter, when it is allegedly contradicted by the other prosecution witnesses’ court testimony.
Earlier during the 1MDB trial, Najib’s lawyers had produced four purported letters — in photocopied form — to support Najib’s defence that the funds that entered his accounts were Saudi donations instead of 1MDB money.
The four letters addressed to Najib were purportedly signed off by the alleged Saudi prince — alternately as “Saud Abdulaziz Al-Saud”, “HRH Prince Saud Abdulaziz Al-Saud”, and “Saud Abdulaziz Al Saud”.
The four letters were dated February 1, 2011 with the alleged prince promising a US$100 million (RM478 million) gift to Najib, November 1, 2011 (US$375 million), March 1, 2013 (US$800 million) and June 1, 2014 (£50 million).
The prosecution had previously in December 2022 insisted that Najib will not be able to use these four letters to defend himself over the RM2.27 billion, as other courts had found the letters to be fabricated or fake.
On October 30 this year, 1MDB trial judge Datuk Collin Lawrence Sequerah had in his decision — to order Najib to enter defence — said Loo’s court testimony of the 2015 event regarding the 2014 letter supports the prosecution’s case that the money received by Najib were not Arab donations, and that it also “raises the reasonable inference” that the other Arab donation letters were of “questionable origin”.
Najib’s 1MDB trial resumes this Thursday.
