PUTRAJAYA — Datuk Seri Najib Razak today insisted that the late Saudi Ruler King Abdullah did actually promise to give him financial aid and political donation, and denied that it was actually Low Taek Jho — now a wanted fugitive — who had told him about the purported promise.
Najib said this while testifying in his corruption and money laundering trial, where over RM2 billion belonging to 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB) allegedly entered the former prime minister’s personal bank accounts.
Najib has been insisting that all these huge sums of money which he received were instead donations from Saudi Arabia.
Najib claimed that King Abdullah had allegedly promised to give him money during a private meeting between the two of them in Saudi Arabia in 2010, and said no one else from the Malaysian delegation joined this meeting.
Najib today said Low — better known as Jho Low — had only been involved in arranging the meeting with the Saudi Ruler in early 2010, disagreeing that Low was the one who shared the alleged donation promise.
The prosecution’s deputy public prosecutor Kamal Baharin Omar had asked him: “I say to you, actually the statement that there would be financial assistance came from Jho Low, and did not come from the king.”
But Najib replied: “I disagree”.
Najib also disagreed that it was actually Low who had in mid-2010 informed him that the Saudi Ruler wanted to give financial assistance.
Today, Kamal Baharin also quizzed Najib over the different terms he had used to describe King Abdullah’s alleged promise.
In Najib’s written witness statement in the 1MDB trial, he had claimed King Abdullah had in the 2010 meeting conveyed “his intention that he would be supporting me financially”, but also claimed he was personally informed by King Abdullah that the Saudi Ruler “would be making political donations personally to me”.
Najib disagreed with Kamal Baharin’s suggestion that King Abdullah had never specifically said that he would be “supporting financially” during the 2010 meeting.
Asked about his initial description of “supporting financially” and later the term “political donations” in his witness statement, Najib merely said these words’ meaning was “almost the same”.
At another point in his witness statement, Najib had claimed King Abdullah had specifically told him that he would be assisted in the 13th general election to ensure his return as prime minister and that he “understood this to be financial assistance”.
Kamal Baharin said Najib’s use of the word “understood” meant that King Abdullah did not specifically say he would give “financial assistance”, but Najib disagreed.
