KUALA LUMPUR (May 23): A Luxembourg court on Thursday fined Edmond de Rothschild over RM119 million for the bank's role in a money-laundering scandal involving 1Malaysia Development Bhd (1MDB), Agence France-Presse reported.

"A very large portion of the funds raised by 1MDB was siphoned off...particularly between 2009 and 2013, by the prime minister, Malaysian officials, and others," the court was quoted as saying by the French news agency also known as AFP.

This is the first time that a Luxembourg banking establishment has been convicted in a money-laundering case, the grand duchy's judicial authorities said as reported by the AFP.

1MDB, created by former prime minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak in 2009, was snagged in graft and money-laundering investigations spanning more than a dozen jurisdictions from the US to Switzerland and from the United Arab Emirates to Singapore.

Najib himself has since been found guilty in a case involving 1MDB’s former subsidiary, and was sentenced to 12 years' jail and fined RM210 million. He has been granted a partial pardon, which reduces his prison term to six years and fine to RM50 million.

Dozens of accounts opened in Luxembourg, which hosts the European subsidiary of Switzerland's Edmond de Rothschild, by an Emirati national in the name of a slew of different companies were reportedly used to divert money away from the fund.

The investigation, which opened in the grand duchy in 2016, "established that through complex international financial flows, funds from 1MDB were ultimately credited to the bank accounts of several of these entities”, the AFP reported.

Before arriving in the accounts, the cash moved through a number of different financial jurisdictions, including Caribbean tax havens, according to the court’s findings.

The events had taken place 15 years ago and led to the "implementation of a comprehensive remediation plan” completed in 2019, Edmond de Rothschild said in a statement obtained by the AFP. "The employees involved are no longer part of the organisation," the statement read.

There are still two other investigations that are ongoing, one concerning the Emirati client and his companies, and the other targeting executives and employees of Edmond de Rothschild Europe, the AFP added.