This article first appeared in The Edge Malaysia Weekly on March 7, 2022 - March 13, 2022

FORMER Goldman Sachs banker Tim Leissner claimed he was “taking responsibility”, owning up to his past misdeeds and criminal acts so he can “look his children in the eye”.

He insisted that while his earlier statements to the authorities were untrue, they were made from a place of fear. His testimony in court is now the truth, he said, and not given to obtain a lighter sentence as there is no plea deal with the US government. While he hopes not to go to prison, he knows it is up to the court to sentence him and that the maximum sentence for the crimes for which he has been charged is life imprisonment.

Roger Ng’s defence attorney, Marc Agnifilo, countered by saying the lies that Leissner has told in the past have been many as he led a duplicitous life — he was a bigamist who cared more for material wealth and influence than anything; and he was a criminal not to be believed.

From repeated assertions that he had turned over a new leaf in response to Agnifilo’s grilling on his tendency to lie, Leissner’s first day under cross-examination on Tuesday (March 1) was a heated affair. Leissner is the prosecution’s star witness in the trial against his former subordinate, Ng — the only Goldman Sachs Group Inc banker to go to trial in the multibillion-dollar 1MDB scandal.

According to transcripts obtained by The Edge, Agnifilo painted Leissner as someone who “blamed others for things that he did” and as someone who had “lied about tremendous matters”.

On his part, Leissner insisted that he had taken full responsibility for his actions and had “come clean since”.

Agnifilo began his cross-examination by grilling Leissner on whether he had lied to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) as well as the prosecutors in the case.

Leissner admitted that at the onset of the meetings, he had minimised his involvement in the 1MDB scheme by, for example, claiming that Ng had directed Leissner’s ex-wife Judy Chan to make the transfers of 1MDB kickbacks.

Agnifilo: The mother of your children — you implicated the mother of your children falsely in criminal activity, correct?

Leissner: Yes, sir. I am not proud of it and I have since then taken that responsibility.

Leissner said he had acted out of fear when he said that and, over the last two weeks of his testimony, he had made it clear that he was the one who directed Chan to make the transfers. He added that he did not believe he had violated his cooperation agreement with the government.

Leissner was stopped at John F Kennedy International Airport and subpoenaed by the grand jury in February 2016 and later arrested on June 10, 2018. While he was indicted under the same charges as Ng for alleged violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA), he took a plea deal and has been cooperating with the government.

Leissner said the investigations had come so close that, even before coming to the US, he decided to “change my life and turn over a new page, a new chapter” and that was what propelled his decision to cooperate with the government.

However, Agnifilo questioned his motive.

Agnifilo: You didn’t want to fight the case because you didn’t think you could win, correct?

Leissner: It wasn’t an assessment of winning or losing, sir. It was an assessment of taking responsibility to do the right thing so I can actually look my children in the eye and say I had finally done the right thing. I had done plenty wrong over time. This was the time to come clean with what I had done.

Agnifilo then proceeded to highlight the elaborate string of romantic entanglements involving Leissner and several women, but the defence attorney particularly zoomed in on Leissner’s tendency to forge documents to carry on lying about his relationships.

The jury heard that Leissner was still married to another woman when he married Chan on Dec 12, 2000, in Hong Kong. He was informed of the confirmation of the divorce only on March 23, 2001.

“She (Chan) knew I had been married. I don’t know if I told her the divorce was taking longer,” he said.

Upon further grilling by Agnifilo, Leissner agreed he had lied to Chan about his marriage certificate by claiming that he was divorced.

The jury also heard that Leissner had converted to Islam twice — once around 2003 and another around 2009 to perhaps “sometime in the future” — marry the women he was involved with: former Astro Malaysia Holdings Bhd group CEO Datuk Rohana Rozhan and Elia Geneid, niece of the former chief minister of Sarawak Tun Abdul Taib Mahmud

He indicated he wasn’t particular about his religion.

Asked about the fake divorce papers, Leissner spoke of getting a divorce certificate from the internet and photoshopping the document. He said he presented a forged divorce document in 2014 to his current wife, Kimora Lee-Simmons, who believed the document to be real.

Agnifilo: And, so, at that point, you had fooled her, fair to say?

Leissner: I had misled her, sir.

Agnifilo: Misled. You had misled her. You had misled her by creating a fake divorce document and leading her to believe that you were divorced. You’ve lied — and you have lied and you have caused people to rely on you and to trust you, right?

Leissner: I’ve lied a lot, sir, and I have regretted those choices all the time. Yes, I have. I have turned over a chapter and I’m not proud of those times.

Earlier in the proceedings, however, prosecutors painted a picture of Leissner as someone who had much at stake if he were to lie in his cooperation deal with the government.

They insinuated that Leissner decided to cooperate despite not knowing the length of his sentence, which could be up to 25 years in jail.

Leissner admitted that he hoped to obtain a 5K letter — a request for a sentence below the guideline based on his substantial assistance in the case. The guideline for breaches of the FCPA is life imprisonment.

Prosecutor Drew Rolle: And sitting here today, do you know if you are going to get that letter?

Leissner: No, I do not know.

Rolle: What sentence do you hope to get in your case?

Leissner: I hope that I don’t have to go to prison. That’s my hope.

The amount he had to forfeit as part of the deal amounted to US$ $43.7 million and stock in Celsius Holdings Inc. He told the jury that he had agreed to forfeit “all right, title and interest” in 3,325,942 shares of Celsius to the US government that he said were worth US$15 million to US$20 million.

The prosecution also highlighted that, should Leissner be found to be lying in his cooperation deal with the government, he still stood to be imprisoned while paying the forfeiture sum and losing his Celsius stock.

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