1MDB fund-related trial begins in Singapore

By Kirsten Han

SINGAPORE (AA) – The first Singaporean trial related to the beleaguered 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB) fund began Monday with a former BSI banker facing charges of perverting the course of justice by tampering with key witnesses

Local press reported that Yeo Jiawei also faces seven charges of cheating, money laundering and forgery, which will be dealt with at a later date.

During the trial, prosecutors said that Yeo was a central figure in the “most complex [and] sophisticated and largest” case of money laundering that the Commercial Affairs Department (CAD) had ever handled.

Yeo is also accused of having accumulated up to $26 million Singapore ($18.6 million) through various means -- including schemes to defraud the local arm of Swiss private bank BSI -- during and after his almost five-year stint as a wealth planner.

The prosecution also indicated that it would be calling nine witnesses to prove that Yeo had tried to interfere with investigations during his trial.

“Unbeknownst to CAD, in the days following his release, the accused proceeded to take active steps to pervert the course of justice,” local newspaper TODAY reported Deputy Public Prosecutor Tan Kiat Pheng telling the court.

“In a display of complete and wanton disregard for the law and CAD’s investigations, he met and contacted key witnesses in the hope of suppressing incriminatory evidence pertaining to his own illicit schemes and activities.”

Yeo had been a wealth planner at the local arm of BSI Bank from December 2009 to July 2014.

“During and after his employment with BSI Bank Limited [Singapore], he played a central role in many activities connected with the money laundering case, in which the laundering of large sums of money were facilitated or concealed,” said the Deputy Public Prosecutor.

Yeo’s name was mentioned in a joint press release by the Attorney-General’s Chambers, the Commercial Affairs Department and the Monetary Authority of Singapore on investigations into 1MDB-related fund flows through Singapore.

The investigations, which began in March 2015, saw bank accounts seized and banks ordered to shut down.

As of July 2016, 240 million Singapore dollars’ worth of assets had been seized, with about 120 million Singapore dollars of these assets belonging to Jho Low -- a Malaysian financier at the center of the 1MDB controversy -- and his family.

Following these investigations, the Monetary Authority of Singapore withdrew BSI Bank’s status as a merchant bank in Singapore after finding “serious breaches of [anti-money laundering] requirements and poor management oversight, and gross misconduct by some of the bank’s staff”.

DBS Bank and the Singapore branches of Standard Chartered Bank, Falcon Private Bank and UBS Bank were also named as financial institutions with weaknesses in anti-money laundering measures.

1MDB -- a brainchild of Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak -- was established in 2009 to undertake key development projects in Kuala Lumpur and spur Malaysia’s economic growth.

Since then, the fund has been hit by controversy revolving around 50 billion Ringgit ($12.9 billion) in debts it has incurred since inception.

U.S. prosecutors allege that 1MDB money was embezzled and laundered into the U.S., from where it was used to buy luxury properties, paintings by Vincent Van Gogh and Claude Monet, a $35 million jet, to pay off gambling debts in Las Vegas, to invest in EMI Music and to fund the production of 2013 Hollywood movie The Wolf of Wall Street.

Among those named in the lawsuit were the movie's co-producer and Razak's stepson Reza Aziz, a Malaysian businessman linked to Razak, Jho Low, and prominent Middle East businessmen Khadem Abdulla Al-Qubaisi and Mohammed Ahmed Badawy Al-Husseiny.