1MDB theft made Attila the Hun look like ‘choirboy’, judge says
Judge Sequerah found Najib guilty on all charges in the long-running trial
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THE judge who convicted former Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak over the 1MDB scandal said the plunder of the sovereign wealth fund was so vast that it eclipsed the exploits of Attila the Hun, one of history’s most notorious conquerors.
“The scale of the plunder that took place (financially speaking, of course) made Attila the Hun look like a choirboy in comparison,” Collin Lawrence Sequerah said in the introduction to his 809-page grounds of judgement.
The written judgement was issued on Tuesday (Jun 16), nearly six months after Sequerah found Najib guilty on all charges in the long-running 1MDB trial and sentenced him to 15 years in prison.
The former premier, who led Malaysia from 2009 to 2018, has already been in jail since 2022 after being convicted in a separate case linked to the fund, formally known as 1Malaysia Development Bhd.
Established during Najib’s first year in office, 1MDB became the centre of a global corruption scandal after billions of dollars were allegedly siphoned from the fund, triggering investigations across multiple jurisdictions.
Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim has said his administration inherited about RM50 billion (S$15.8 billion) of 1MDB-related debt after Najib’s government was voted out in 2018.
“At the heart of this scandal, stood not a humble employee of an organisation who saw an opportunity to exploit a flaw in the system, but a man exalted and who held the highest reins of power,” Sequerah wrote.
Najib’s 1MDB trial took more than seven years from the time Najib was first charged. It has “in all probability surpassed the length of any other trial in the annals of the Malaysian court history,” Sequerah said. BLOOMBERG
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