Najib’s bid for documents vital to his 1MDB case to be heard on May 31

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KUALA LUMPUR: The High Court will on May 31 hear Datuk Seri Najib Razak’s bid to get hold of the documents related to 1Malaysia Development Bhd (1MDB) involving the United States investment bank Goldman Sachs and former Bank Negara Malaysia (BNM) governor Tan Sri Dr Zeti Akhtar Aziz’s family.

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The former prime minister had filed two discovery applications for the documents to be disclosed to aid his defence in his ongoing trial involving the misappropriation of RM2.28 billion of 1MDB funds.

Earlier, deputy public prosecutor Mohamad Mustaffa P. Kunyalam told the court that the prosecution needed time to reply to both bids.

“We (prosecution) received the cause papers (of the second discovery application) on April 12. We seek to reply to the applications and we need at least two weeks,” he said.

He also informed the court that a similar application (on Najib’s first application) has been scheduled to be heard on May 20 and proposed May 31 for both applications to be heard together.

Najib’s lawyer Tan Sri Muhammad Shafee Abdullah agreed for the two applications to be jointly heard on that day.

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Judge Collin Lawrence Sequerah then fixed May 31 to hear the two applications and ordered for parties to file their written submissions by May 17.

On March 24, Najib filed his first bid through a notice of motion seeking a court order to compel the prosecution to provide his defence with several banking statements involving the bank accounts of Zeti’s family.

The accounts were related to allegations that the family had received monies from 1MDB-linked fugitive Low Taek Jho or Jho Low.

In his first application, Najib claimed that the statements and documents which were vital and relevant to his 1MDB trial were under the custody of the prosecution and other entities.

Najib filed his second application on April 5, seeking for the confidential settlement agreement between the government of Malaysia and the Goldman Sachs Group entered in 2020.

He had also in his second bid sought for the transcripts or forensic report on the phones of former Goldman Sachs parter in Asia Tim Leissner as well as the latter’s communication and data stored on Goldman Sachs servers.-NST


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