Najib Razak 1MDB scandal: Malaysian Prime Minister’s accounts triggered internal money-laundering alarm
(ABC) – These were deposited by Nik Faisal Bin Ariff Kamil, the former investment director of 1MDB and chief executive of state-owned company SRC International. The files show he was a signatory to the Prime Minister’s account.
So much money was pouring so rapidly into the Malaysian Prime Minister’s personal bank accounts that it rang internal money-laundering alarms inside AmBank, a major Malaysian institution part-owned by Australia’s ANZ.
Hundreds of millions of dollars were being wired into Najib Razak’s accounts from the Saudi Arabian Government, a mysterious Saudi prince and two shadowy British Virgin Island companies, while the head of a Malaysian state-owned company topped up the Prime Minister’s credit card accounts with millions of Malaysian ringgit in cash.
Mr Najib’s Platinum Mastercard and Platinum Visa had been overdrawn thanks to a 3,320,670.65 ringgit ($US1,039,369.91) purchase of jewellery in September 2014 — a spending spree described inside AmBank as a “huge volume”.
Mr Najib’s wife Rosmah Mansor has previously been reported to have purchased a series of luxury items, from diamond jewellery to designer handbags, which appear beyond her husband’s $A130,000 official annual salary.