Malaysia

Over the better part of the past year, we’ve documented the curious case of 1MDB, Malaysia’s government investment fund founded in 2009.

It’s a long and exceptionally convoluted story that doesn’t exactly lend itself to a concise summary but suffice to say that the development bank was something of a black box right from the beginning and in 2013, some $680 million allegedly tied to 1MDB ended up in Malaysian PM Najib Razak’s personal bank account just prior to an election.

Submitted by Pater Tenebrarum via Acting-Man.com,

Mr. X and his Mysterious Benefactors

As the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) reports, a money-laundering alarm was triggered at AmBank in Malaysia, a bank part-owned by one of Australia’s “big four” banks, ANZ. What had triggered the alarm? Money had poured into the personal account of one of the bank’s customers, a certain Mr. X, in truly staggering amounts.

A recent photograph of Mr. X.

Earlier this week, Malaysia’s top prosecutor Attorney General Mohamed Apandi Ali cleared PM Najib Razak of any wrongdoing in connection with some $681 million that landed in his bank account back in 2013.

The money was “a personal donation” from the Saudis, the investigation found and no further information was necessary. That, we said, was unlikely to satisfy critics.

Critics like former PM Mahathir Mohamad, the “founding father” of modern Malaysia who has a series of questions about the alleged “donation” including the following:

On Tuesday we learned that Malaysian PM Najib Razak won’t have too much explaining to do domestically when it comes to why Saudi Arabia decided in 2013 to make a $681 million “donation” to his personal bank account.