Davide Ghiglione in Milan, Simeon Kerr in Dubai and Caroline Binham in London
Financial Times
APRIL 24, 2017

Prosecutors looking at involvement of a former managing director of Abu Dhabi’s Ipic 

Italian prosecutors are investigating a former Emirati sovereign wealth fund official over allegations of insider trading in UniCredit shares in 2010 as the fallout from the Malaysian 1MDB scandal spreads through Abu Dhabi’s overseas investment portfolio.

Prosecutors in Milan placed Khadem al-Qubaisi, the jailed former managing director of Abu Dhabi’s International Petroleum Investment Company (Ipic), under investigation “several months ago,” said a person briefed on the probe.

The Italian prosecutor’s office confirmed the probe and said it is “currently working to collect the final elements” for the investigation. A spokesman for the office declined to comment further. Read the rest of this entry »

The Information Ministry’s Special Affairs Division (Jasa), which has been assigned the special task of exonerating the Prime Minister, Datuk Seri Najib Razak and the Malaysian government of any responsibility for the 1MDB kleptocratic scandal, made a startling statement when its director general, Datuk Mohd Puad Zakashi, said that the arbitration settlement between 1MDB and Abu Dhabi’s International Petroleum Investment Corporation (IPIC) has “weakened” US Department of Justice (DOJ) civil suits and claims that the 1MDB funds were stolen.

Puad may not have realized it, but his statement was as good as a government admission that the US DOJ has a case to apply for the forfeiture of more than US$1 billion of 1MDB-linked assets, but the Malaysian government believes that the arbitration settlement has weakened the suits from the evidential aspects.

Whether this is so is open to dispute, but it is most startling, to say the least, that the Malaysian government, which has completely denied that there is a 1MDB scandal, both nationally and internationally, suddenly accepting the scenario that DOS had a case to apply for the forfeiture of over US$1 billion of 1MDB-linked assets – subject to the availability of adequate evidential material to prop up the kleptocratic suits.

If the Malaysian government’s stand is that there is no 1MDB scandal at all, that all the 1MDB allegations are the “fevered imaginations” of those with ill-intentions to the Najib government, including several foreign nations, then Puad and the Malaysian Government should be consistent in holding that there is simply no case whatsoever for the DOJ lawsuits – and not talking about the “weakening” of DOJ law suits as a result of the 1MDB-IPIC arbitration agreement! Read the rest of this entry »

By NEIL GOUGH
New York Times
APRIL 24, 2017

HONG KONG — In 2012, with help from Goldman Sachs, a Malaysian sovereign wealth fund called 1Malaysia Development Berhad sold $3.5 billion worth of bonds backed by an Abu Dhabi government fund to help it purchase power plants.

But behind the scenes, American officials have claimed, nearly $1.45 billion was illegally redirected to Swiss bank accounts and ultimately into the hands of some of the people involved in the deal.

That deal is now part of an international investigation into the Malaysian fund, known as 1MDB, that has plagued Najib Razak, the prime minister of Malaysia. A civil complaint filed by Justice Department officials in the United States said that some of the funds landed in the hands of Mr. Najib’s friends and associates as well as officials and executives from Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund.

On Monday, Malaysia and Abu Dhabi moved to clean up one part of the scandal: who would pay back investors who bought the bonds. Read the rest of this entry »