KUALA LUMPUR (Feb 19): Tan Sri Muhammad Shafee Abdullah has questioned the omission of several documents linked to the 1Malaysia Development Bhd (1MDB) investigations, which were obtained by Malaysian regulators from overseas via Mutual Legal Assistance (MLA).
Shafee, who is representing former prime minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak in the 1MDB-Tanore trial, raised this during his cross-examination of Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission (MACC) senior superintendent Nur Aida Arifin at the hearing.
This was after Nur Aida confirmed she omitted certain documents from the bundles presented in court for this case. The set of MLA documents were obtained from foreign authorities in Hong Kong, Switzerland, Singapore and Barbados.
Shafee: Why didn’t you provide the rest (of the documents) to the defence so the defence [can determine] whether they are relevant to the defence or not?
Aida: When I looked at the documents, for me they were not relevant. I had briefed the prosecution and after the prosecution perused the documents, they suggested the documents that should be tendered in court.
It was then that Justice Datuk Collin Lawrence Sequerah reminded Shafee that it is the prosecution who decides which documents are tendered in court.
Shafee replied that he had to ask Nur Aida, because the prosecution team was not on the witness stand.
The lawyer earlier pointed to defects in documents tendered, including the lack of stamps to establish them as certified true copies, as well as inconsistent stamping of pages in the documents.
Najib is facing 25 counts of graft in relation to the US$681 million that ended up in his personal accounts — four for abuse of power and 21 for money laundering — in the 1MDB-Tanore trial, so named due to the fact that they involved transactions between 1MDB and Tanore.
After the cross-examination, the court took a recess as Nur Aida needed to arrange some bundles of the tendered documents. The trial did not continue after the recess and it was adjourned to Feb 26.