PUTRAJAYA, Oct 21 — Datuk Seri Najib Razak today said in his 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB) trial that he is not asking for immunity as a former prime minister, but wants to be treated equally in this trial.
Today is the first day of the final submissions by both the defence and prosecution before the High Court decides if Najib is guilty or not in this case, where he is facing 25 charges involving over RM2 billion of 1MDB’s funds.
Before his lawyers began presenting arguments in court, Najib spent 16 minutes reading out his prepared statement — which his lead lawyer Tan Sri Muhammad Shafee Abdullah described as a “foreword” — to the judge.
Najib insisted that the huge sums of money which entered his personal bank accounts were donations from Saudi Arabia to him.
“It will also be discovered from this submission that my belief about the Saudi donation is not just some made-up fantasy,” Najib said, among other things.
Najib claimed that the US$681 million which entered his bank accounts was allegedly not proved to be traceable to 1MDB, and asserted he had returned US$620 million of this sum to the bank account where it came from, since it had not been used up.
“Before returning the unused donation, I wrote to the Governor of Bank Negara, Tan Sri Zeti, seeking Bank Negara’s approval for the return.
“I would probably be the only alleged ‘corrupt politician/money-launderer’ who returns the so-called gratification that he worked so hard to obtain, and probably the first in recorded history to have announced his ‘ill-gotten’ money to the Governor of Bank Negara of all people,” Najib said, referring to former BNM governor Tan Sri Zeti Akhtar Aziz.
