PUTRAJAYA: Datuk Seri Najib Razak today questioned why he should be blamed for not checking if 1Malaysia Development Berhad’s (1MDB) purported joint venture partner PetroSaudi International was really owned by Saudi Arabia’s royal family, saying in court that this is not his job as the prime minister.
Najib was testifying in his own defence in the trial where 1MDB’s RM2 billion is alleged to have entered his personal bank accounts.
When the prosecution said he had previously confirmed he did not check the alleged Saudi-owned PetroSaudi’s actual ownership, Najib insisted it was up to the 1MDB board whether to enter into the US$1 billion partnership with the company and it was 1MDB’s lawyers’ job to do the checks.
“Yes, but the board has to decide, and due diligence has to take place. When you do a joint venture, one of the basic principles is to check ownership of the company — that was supposed to be done by Wong & Partners. Wong & Partners did not do that, how can I be blamed for that?
“Surely when you do business with another company, you do the normal due diligence, you have to check ownership. It’s not my job as prime minister to do all the checking, the checking has to be done by the people who are responsible to do up the joint venture, to check the legal papers, that’s their job, they are paid for it, why should I be blamed for this?” he said in court today.
Najib gave this response while the prosecution was grilling him on why he had appeared to “assume” a lot of things based on what Low Taek Jho told him.
Deputy public prosecutor Ahmad Akram Gharib was asking Najib about the September 26, 2009 incident, where Low spoke to Najib first in a phone conversation before passing his mobile phone to 1MDB’s then chairman Tan Sri Mohd Bakke Salleh while saying “PM on the line, want to speak to you”.
According to Bakke’s court testimony previously, Najib said in the phone call that he wanted the 1MDB board to quickly consider the proposed joint venture with PetroSaudi and to “firm up a decision on it” and that he was looking forward to the signing of the deal.
The phone call took place just before the 1MDB board of directors’ meeting, where the board then decided to approve 1MDB’s joint venture with PetroSaudi.
After insisting that it was not his job to check PetroSaudi’s ownership and after much grilling by Akram on the phone call, Najib said: “I think you are overstating the phone call too much, no, no, no, nowhere did I tell them forget, go ahead with it. I didn’t say, ‘I’m instructing you to do that’.
“In other words, I encouraged them to make informed decision, but as a board, as a company, when you do joint venture, you have to check ownership of the company, that is the ABC of doing business, but that was not done. How can you blame it on me?” Najib said.
Even as Akram pointed out that the Finance Ministry-owned 1MDB’s sole shareholder was represented by Najib, Najib agreed he was 1MDB’s sole shareholder but insisted that the shareholder should not be the one blamed “all the time”. He added that the 1MDB board and management should carry out their fiduciary duties.
Akram also listed out five things that Najib allegedly told Bakke about the proposed US$1 billion joint venture in that crucial phone conversation before the 1MDB board made its decision, noting that Najib had however only addressed one of these points in his entire witness statement in the 1MDB trial.
Akram then suggested that Najib had influenced the 1MDB chairman Bakke and the 1MDB board’s decision at the time, when the 1MDB board had RM5 billion to spend as it had raised that amount.
“No, I didn’t influence him, I didn’t instruct him, I only indicated to him from a strategic point of view,” Najib said, insisting that the other 1MDB board members were not influenced as he claimed that they did not know of his phone call to Bakke.
Najib said this was because the 1MDB board meeting minutes for September 26, 2009 had not referred to him.
Bakke had however previously said that Najib’s phone call did have an impact on other 1MDB directors and that the phone conversation’s content was shared with the directors, but the 1MDB board had decided not to record the phone conversation with the then prime minister in the meeting minutes.
Asked about his failure to explain the four other items in his phone conversation with Bakke, Najib said: “Tak ada (Don’t have), because I didn’t want to instruct him or unduly influence him, I just wanted him to see it as an important strategic cooperation.”
