PUTRAJAYA, Oct 22 — Judges, who had convicted and upheld former prime minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak‘s conviction in SRC’s RM42 million case, had not concluded that the four letters which purportedly promised huge sums of Saudi donation to him were fake, his lawyer argued today.
Najib’s lawyer Wan Azwan Aiman Wan Fakhruddin today argued that AmBank had received the four donation letters “contemporaneously” or at the same time that the money was sent to the then prime minister’s private bank accounts.
The lawyer said these four donation letters were the basis for the bank’s approval of the inflows of money into Najib’s account.
“Neither the High Court in the SRC case nor the Court of Appeal and Federal Court made any definitive finding that the donation letters were false or fabricated.
“Justice Nazlan in the SRC case merely rejected the donation on the facts of that case, but more importantly did not conclude that the letters were forgeries,” he said in the High Court in Najib’s separate trial involving more than RM2 billion of 1MDB’s funds.
The lawyer was referring to SRC trial judge Datuk Mohd Nazlan Mohd Ghazali’s decision at the High Court, where the judge rejected Najib’s claim that the money which entered his bank accounts were donations from Saudi Arabia and not money misappropriated from SRC International.
Wan Azwan Aiman argued that the courts’ reasoning in the SRC case should be left to the SRC case and urged 1MDB trial judge Datuk Collin Lawrence Sequerah to make his own independent decision about whether the donation letters were genuine.
In this trial, Najib has been insisting that the sum of more than RM2 billion which entered his accounts were not 1MDB money but Saudi donations, while the prosecution has been disputing the four donation letters as fabricated documents.
The late Datuk Seri Gopal Sri Ram had as the then 1MDB lead prosecutor previously said the High Court, Court of Appeal and Federal Court had all given zero weight to the four purported Saudi donation letters in the SRC case and told the 1MDB trial that these letters were “worthless documents” and had been found to be a “fabrication”.
Najib’s lawyer Wan Azwan Aiman was addressing this point by the prosecution today.
Since yesterday, Wan Azwan Aiman also listed multiple reasons to argue that the four donation letters were not fabricated and that Najib had reason to believe that he was receiving donations from Saudi Arabia.
Among other things, he challenged the credibility of prosecution witness Jasmine Loo’s testimony in the 1MDB trial that Low Taek Jho had ordered Kee Kok Thiam to prepare one of the Saudi donation letters, and that she had seen Kee doing so while they were all in a hotel in London.
Wan Azwan Aiman also argued today that the four power of abuse charges against Najib in the 1MDB case were defective and ambiguous, and that these charges were illegal because of the “duplicity” of the charges.
He said these four charges had “duplicity” as multiple offences were combined in each charge.
Najib’s lead defence lawyer Tan Sri Muhammad Shafee Abdullah today also argued that the four power of abuse charges were illegal due to the duplicity, and said the prosecution’s alleged “blunder” in framing these charges cannot be cured even by the courts as it goes beyond mere irregularity.
“Therefore, the only order that Yang Arif can make for these four charges is an immediate acquittal,” he claimed, arguing that there was no way these four charges could be “saved”.
The 1MDB trial resumes this afternoon.
