Najib knew 1MDB used as political slush fund, claims journalist

KUALA LUMPUR: Former prime minister Datuk Seri Najib Tun Razak knew that 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB) was being used as a political slush fund but was disengaged from its day-to-day operations.

This claim was made in a report by news portal Coconuts reported citing Tom Wright, the author of the Billion Dollar Whale. In an interview with Coconuts editor-in-chief Chad Williams, Wright said while he doesn’t think Najib is blameless, he believes fugitive businessman Low Taek Jho, or better known as Jho Low, was running the show.

“I’m sure he (Najib) knew it was a political slush fund, that they were getting hundreds of millions of dollars for (former ruling political party) Umno, and that his family was getting mansions and running film companies and all this kind of thing, which he may have just seen as a benefit of being prime minister.

“Terribly corrupt. Not saying it’s not. But did Najib know that Jho Low had run the fund in a way that took out US$4.5bil, US$5bil, maybe US$6bil dollars? I don’t think so.

“I think he was disengaged from the day-to-day processes in a way that Jho Low was not. Jho Low was running the show,” he said.

The Billion Dollar Whale, written by The Wall Street Journal’s Wright and Bradley Hope, is a book about their work exposing the 1MDB scandal.

Wright in the interview claimed that Jho Low was the “pupper master” in the scandal.

“A lot of reporting we did for this was triangulation. We would have some investigative documents from Switzerland, some from Malaysia, some from the United States.

“We’d have some from Singapore, we’d have our own documents that we pulled from the British Virgin Islands, and we would start to see patterns where Jho Low was always in control, of everything. He was the centre of the spider web,” Wright claimed.