KUALA LUMPUR (Dec 10): Former prime minister Datuk Seri Najib Abdul Razak has dismissed Jasmine Loo’s testimony, in which she claimed to have witnessed fugitive businessman Low Taek Jho (Jho Low) and his associate drafting one of the four “Arab donation” letters from Prince Saud Abdulaziz Al-Saud to Najib. Najib likened what Loo had described to a scene from a Bollywood movie.
Najib, who was testifying in his own defence at the 1MDB-Tanore trial at the High Court here, claimed that Loo’s version of events — where she had stumbled upon Jho Low’s associate drafting a fake Arab donation letter on a laptop in 2015 — cannot be real. Loo was formerly the legal counsel for 1Malaysia Development Bhd (1MDB).
This is because other witnesses had testified to the existence of the donation letters prior to 2015, Najib said, referring to Cheah Teck Kuang, Joanna Yu, Yap Wai Keat and R Uma Devi — all from AmBank — who had confirmed the existence of the Arab donation letters prior to 2015.
He said even former Bank Negara Malaysia governor Tan Seri Zeti Akhtar Aziz had confirmed the existence of the letters prior to 2015.
“In fact, Yu, Yap and Uma Devi confirmed that when funds were transferred into my AmIslamic bank account between 2011 to 2014, they relied on the donation letters as supporting documentation, including the 2014 donation letter — contrary to Jasmine Loo’s account that this donation letter was drafted in 2015,” he said reading from his 525-page witness statement.
“Despite this clear and corroborated evidence, MACC (Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission) and the prosecution have chosen to accept Jasmine Loo’s account in its entirety, even though her account is so implausible that it could easily be mistaken for a scene from a Bollywood movie,” he said.
Previously, Loo had testified that she had seen Jho Low, and his now deceased associate Kee Kok Thiam, draft the letter in early 2015, after various parties started questioning the source of the billions that had landed in Najib’s private accounts.
Loo said she had gone to London in early 2015, and was summoned by Jho Low to meet him at the Mayfair Hotel there.
Upon her arrival at the hotel, she said she saw Ihsan Perdana Sdn Bhd (IPSB) managing director Datuk Dr Shamsul Anwar Sulaiman and Yayasan Rakyat 1Malaysia (YR1M) project director Dennis See there, with Jho Low and Kee.
Loo further testified that Shamsul had asked Jho Low about how he was going to handle the issue of the money that had been transferred to Najib’s private accounts from IPSB and SRC International.
“After that, Jho Low ordered Kee Kok Thiam to prepare a confirmation letter from Prince Saud to state that the money put into [Najib]’s account was a donation from Saudi Arabia. After that, I went out for a while with Jho Low to discuss other matters. But when I reentered the [venue], I saw Kee Kok Thiam preparing a draft of a donation letter from Prince Saud,” according to Loo’s witness statement, which she read out before judge Datuk Collin Lawrence Sequerah.
She had also verified that the draft was to be a letter from Prince Saud Abdulaziz Al-Saud, dated June 1, 2014, to Najib. (See story: Jasmine Loo says she witnessed Jho Low order his associate to draft ’Arab donation’ letter to Najib)
Najib took a swipe at Loo’s account of events and the prosecution’s sole reliance on her testimony, without corroborating it with the other witnesses who were present.
“To me, this entire narrative is more like a scene from a Bollywood movie than a credible sequence of events. In fact, it is so ludicrous that it borders on humour, yet the prosecution presented her claim, which is to be believed above others whose contemporaneous recount of events supports my defence,” he said.
He added that this was just one example of “malicious prosecution” against him.
“Also, I wonder why did the prosecution left out the other characters in Jasmine’s (Loo) story; is it because they cannot support an event that did not happen? But, then again, they are not short of witnesses who can testify on events that never happened and don’t exist,” he said.
When Najib was called to enter his defence in this trial on Oct 30, Sequerah had addressed this in his judgement, saying that the donation letters were “questionable” because of Loo’s testimony.
“This piece of evidence (Loo’s testimony) supports the case for the prosecution that the funds received by the accused were not in fact donations from the Arabs, but a result of the actions and vested interests of the accused, as stated in the charges proffered.
“This further raises the reasonable inference that the other letters in respect of the Arab donations were of questionable origin,” Sequerah said in his brief grounds for his decision.
The four letters, which were previously produced in court, stated that the money was given to Najib with no strings attached, in recognition of the former prime minister’s contribution to the Islamic world, and that there was no expectation for the money to be returned.
Najib received US$681 million, or over RM2 billion, over a period of four years from 2011 to 2014. He has maintained that he had “returned” US$620 million to the donor through Tanore Finance Corp (Tanore), a company owned by another Jho Low associate, Eric Tan Kim Loong, who remains at large.
Read also:
Origin of Najib's Arab donation letters 'questionable', says 1MDB-Tanore trial judge
1MDB-Tanore: Najib says 1MDB, its projects not for Umno or his benefit
Najib asks, if intention was to plunder 1MDB, why open local bank accounts
Govt assurance for 1MDB's US$3 bil JV with Aabar was not rushed, says Najib