U.S. jury deliberates in ex-Goldman banker’s 1MDB corruption trial

NEW YORK, April 8 (Reuters) – A U.S. jury resumed deliberations on Friday in the demo of a previous Goldman Sachs (GS.N) banker accused of encouraging loot billions of pounds from Malaysia’s 1MDB sovereign prosperity fund.

Prosecutors say Roger Ng, Goldman Sachs Team Inc’s previous top financial investment banker for Malaysia, helped his then-manager Tim Leissner embezzle dollars from the fund — which was started to go after improvement jobs in the Southeast Asian nation — launder the proceeds and bribe officers to get small business for Goldman.

Ng, 49, has pleaded not responsible to conspiring to launder revenue and violating an anti-corruption law. His lawyers say Leissner, who pleaded responsible to very similar rates in 2018 and agreed to cooperate with prosecutors’ investigation, falsely implicated Ng in the hopes of obtaining a lenient sentence.

The costs stemmed from just one of the largest financial scandals in history.

Prosecutors have reported Goldman assisted 1MDB elevate $6.5 billion through 3 bond revenue, but that $4.5 billion was diverted to authorities officers, bankers and their associates by way of bribes and kickbacks among 2009 and 2015.

Ng is the to start with, and most likely only, human being to encounter trial in the United States above the plan. Goldman in 2020 paid a practically $3 billion high-quality and its Malaysian device agreed to plead responsible.

Deliberations started on Tuesday after a almost two-thirty day period trial in federal courtroom in Brooklyn.

Jurors listened to nine days of testimony from Leissner, who reported he despatched Ng $35 million in kickbacks. Leissner reported the males agreed to notify banks a “cover story” that the revenue was from a respectable business undertaking among their wives.

Ng’s wife, Hwee Bin Lim, afterwards testified for the protection that the business enterprise enterprise was, in fact, reputable. She explained she invested $6 million in the mid-2000s in a Chinese firm owned by the family of Leissner’s then-wife, Judy Chan, and that the $35 million was her return on that investment.

Ng’s attorney, Marc Agnifilo, stated in his closing argument on Monday that Leissner could not be trusted. A prosecutor, Alixandra Smith, mentioned in her summation that Leissner’s testimony was backed up by other evidence.

Jho Lower, a Malaysian financier and suspected mastermind of the scheme, was indicted alongside Ng in 2018 but remains at massive.

Reporting by Luc Cohen in New York editing by Jonathan Oatis

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