Money from investment not from 1MDB, Ng’s wife tells trial

 

Former Goldman Sachs banker Roger Ng is charged with conspiring to launder money and violate a US anti-corruption law in connection with 1MDB. (AP pic)

NEW YORK: The wife of former Goldman Sachs Inc banker Roger Ng testified on Monday in her husband’s defence at his US trial over the looting of hundreds of millions of dollars from 1MDB between 2009 and 2014.

Lim Hwee Bin testified that shortly after Ng began working for former Goldman banker Tim Leissner in the mid-2000s, she invested 48 million yuan – about US$6 million at the time – in a Chinese company owned by the family of Leissner’s wife, Judy Chan.

She said she and Chan had a falling out in 2011, and Chan told her to divest her share, which had appreciated substantially. In 2012, Chan told her she was ready to transfer US$26 million, Lim testified.

Asked by Ng’s lawyer, Marc Agnifilo, if the money Chan said she would send to Lim came from 1MDB, Lim replied: “Not at all.”

“It had to come from Judy and her family,” she said.

A lawyer for Chan did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Lim’s testimony came on the second day of the defence’s case in the trial, which began in early February.

Ng, Goldman’s former chief for Malaysia, is charged with conspiring to launder money and violate an anti-corruption law. Prosecutors say he helped Leissner embezzle money from 1MDB, launder the proceeds and bribe officials to win business for Goldman.

Ng, 49, has pleaded not guilty. He argues that some US$35 million he received from Leissner, which prosecutors characterise as kickbacks from the scheme, was actually the proceeds of a legitimate business venture between the two men’s wives.

Leissner, who in 2018 pleaded guilty to similar charges, testified in February that the investment Lim made in Chan’s Chinese business was a “cover story” that he and Ng concocted to explain the kickback payment so that the banks processing the funds would not grow suspicious.

The charges stem from one of the biggest financial scandals in history, in which US prosecutors say US$4.5 billion of the US$6.5 billion Goldman raised for 1MDB was diverted to government officials, bankers and their associates through bribes and kickbacks.

Goldman in 2020 paid a nearly US$3 billion fine and arranged for its Malaysian unit to plead guilty in a US court. - FMT