PUTRAJAYA, Jan 23 — Datuk Seri Najib Razak today suggested it would be like committing “hara-kiri” or suicide if he suspected that the huge sums of money that entered his private AmIslamic bank accounts were not donations from Saudi Arabia.
Najib was testifying in his defence in the trial where 1Malaysia Development Berhad’s (1MDB) RM2 billion allegedly entered his personal accounts, and has been insisting that those money was gifts and political donations promised by the late Saudi ruler King Abdullah.
Najib said he did not confirm or ask about the sources of the purported donations sent to his bank accounts, as he thought it would be sufficient to rely on AmBank and Bank Negara Malaysia to alert him of any suspicious transactions.
Najib’s lead defence lawyer Tan Sri Muhammad Shafee Abdullah then asked: “Did you for a moment, at all material times, did you entertain any notion that these monies could have come from elsewhere other than the Saudi Arabian sources?”
Najib replied: “No, I didn’t. And if I had any shadow of doubt, then I wouldn’t receive the money. Because knowing that it comes to my personal account and that it is being supervised by the central bank, then I would be causing a lot of problems for myself, if I knew and I didn’t do anything about it.
“That would in fact be in a sense committing suicide,” he said.
When Shafee suggested it would be like “hara-kiri”, Najib agreed: “Hara-kiri or whatever you like to call it.”
Earlier, Najib was asked to respond to the prosecution’s suggestion that he still had the responsibility to check for any issues in his personal bank accounts, even though he had issued two mandate letters to authorise Nik Faisal Ariff Kamil to handle his personal bank accounts.
Najib however responded by saying that he would only have checked the transactions in his personal bank accounts if he was alerted of the need to check them.
“Yang Arif, if I need to check, it must be something that would be a signal to me that I needed to check.
“The reason why I signed this mandate letter, is because being the prime minister then, I’m so busy with so many things, so it would be too taxing and too time-consuming for me to check every single transaction.
“So whenever there is something, you know, a signal from the bank or the compliance manager, something like that, then it would necessitate me to check,” he said.
Asked by his defence lawyer Wan Azwan Aiman Wan Fakhruddin what he meant by “signal”, Najib said that the bank should refer to him if they had some doubts about a transaction and that he would then check the transaction.
Earlier, Najib listed down the reasons why he believed the money in his personal accounts was not illegal money, including his belief that the funds were based on King Abdullah’s support of him through “political funding” and as it came from reputable sources such as the Saudi royal family.
He said some of the purported donations also came from companies that were named in purported letters which promised him Saudi donations, and said AmIslamic Bank or AmBank and Bank Negara Malaysia did not raise any red flags over the money that came into his accounts.
“As I was fully aware, being a politically exposed person, therefore the level of regulatory oversight would be exceedingly high than normal persons, but despite that, there were no red flags, you know, by these two bodies, so there was nothing to indicate that there were sources that were rather dubious,” he said.
Najib’s 1MDB trial before judge Datuk Collin Lawrence Sequerah resumes this afternoon.
