If Najib Razak, the defeated prime minister of Malaysia, and his spendthrift wife, Rosmah Mansor, were hoping to relax and forget — even briefly — their legal woes during a family holiday last week, they were in for a disappointment.
Banned from leaving the country, they opted for the resort island of Langkawi for a reunion with family members, including Rosmah’s son, Riza Aziz, a Hollywood financier. But any hopes of a quiet getaway were thwarted when their 30 items of luggage were seen.
The choice of the Andaman Sea destination close to Thai waters unleashed fresh speculation that they might try to slip away by boat or plane. The local police chief, however, assured Malaysians that his officers were monitoring Najib.
The couple, who long revelled in the limelight, have rarely been seen since Najibs’s shock election defeat last month. But they were both pictured in their Kuala Lumpur mansion, watching forlornly as police conducted a two-day raid before carting off 284 of Mansor’s designer bags, luxury watches and $29m (£21.8m) in cash.
They have since given testimony to anti-corruption investigators probing allegations of rampant fraud at 1MDB, the showpiece state investment fund that racked up debt of $10bn after it was set up by Najib in 2009.
Both deny wrongdoing. But while they were trying to put their feet up on their tropical paradise last week, the prospect deepened that the next stop for at least one of them could be behind bars.
First, Mahathir Mohamad, the Malaysian prime minister, revealed that prosecutors had put together an “almost perfect case” against Najib. He also raised the spectre of a legal challenge for Rosmah, saying: “Some of the money is believed to have gone to her — lots of money.”
And then came dramatic developments in another high-profile case swirling around Najib after the father of a Mongolian model murdered in Malaysia in 2006 arrived in Kuala Lumpur to meet Mahathir.
The next day, federal police reopened their investigation of the grisly killing of Altantuya Shaariibuu, who was shot in the head before her body, carrying her unborn child, was blown to pieces by military explosives.
There is widespread suspicion that she was killed because of what she knew about an alleged armaments bribery scandal and senior figures’ private lives.
A cast of characters linked to Najib, who was defence minister at the time, is associated with her gruesome fate. Shaariibuu was the former mistress of a Najib confidant, whom she was reportedly seeking to blackmail over an alleged kickbacks scheme. And she was abducted outside his home by two policemen from Najib’s bodyguard unit.
Her father has lodged a fresh police report naming another Najib insider, his then aide-de-camp, as a potential key new witness.
Najib responded by repeating his insistence that he had never met the dead woman and had no connection to her fate, claiming that he was the victim of a witch-hunt.
He also used his time on Langkawi, in his first media interview since the election, to lament his fate. “People would expect a former prime minister to be treated with decorum,” he told Reuters. “Instead, I’ve been subjected to raids and all the other things. They wanted to tarnish my image in the court of public opinion.”
His protestations of innocence, despite his roles as head of the 1MDB advisory board and finance minister as well as prime minister, earned a scornful riposte from Mahathir.
“Najib always assumes that people are stupid,” he said, noting that his one-time protégé had signed his name on big 1MDB transactions. “If he doesn’t know, it must be he doesn’t understand what a signature means.”
– https://www.thetimes.co.uk/
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