Ex-Goldman Sachs banker Roger Ng gets 10 years in billion-dollar plot to loot Malaysian state investment fund
A former Goldman Sachs banker found guilty of helping perpetrate a massive, mutli-billion-dollar fraud from a Malaysian development fund will spend 10 years in prison, a federal judge in Brooklyn ruled Thursday.
Roger Ng, 51, conspired with colleague Tim Leissner and Malaysian socialite Jho Low to convince the New York-based bank to raise billions in cash in 2012 for 1MDB, a Malaysian fund meant to help the country’s economy, prosecutors said. A jury found him guilty last April.
All the while, Ng and his cohorts secretly bribed high-level officials in Malaysia and the United Arab Emirates to steal more than $1 billion from the fund for their own use, paying for lavish parties, chartered private jets, yachts and six-carat diamond rings.
Some of the pilfered cash was even used to fund the “Wolf of Wall Street” starring Leonardo DiCaprio, according to the feds.
“This is one of the biggest financial crimes in the history of the world,” Brooklyn Federal Court Judge Margo Brodie said as she handed down her sentence. “It has been difficult to fully grasp the complexity, the scope and the impact of this financial bribery scheme.”
Ng was pulling in more than $1 million a year through his job and still decided to take in $35 million from the scam, prosecutors said in a sentencing memo filed this month.
“Despite the fact that you had a great job, made good money, and would have been comfortable, the only explanation for your conduct is greed,” Brodie said.
Ng and other Goldman Sachs bankers helped 1MDB raise $6.5 billion through bond sales, but they redirected $4.5 billion of that money back into their and their co-conspirators’ pockets. Former Malaysian prime minister, Najib Razak, and other Malaysian officials were involved. Razak is serving a 12-year sentence in Malaysia.
“Roger Ng was a central player in a brazen and audacious scheme that not only victimized the people of Malaysia, but also risked undermining the public’s confidence in governments, markets, businesses and other institutions on a global scale,” U.S Attorney Breon Peace said.
Low, the alleged mastermind, is still on the run from the law.
Ng’s defense lawyers were asking for a sentence of time served. He spent six months in a Malaysian jail after his arrest in 2018, and during that time, he contracted malaria and severe Leptospirosis, a possibly fatal bacterial disease spread through the urine of infected rats.
“There is no more general deterrent than I can think of than putting a Goldman Sachs managing director into a small Malaysian prison cell with only a hole to defecate in,” said his lawyer, Marc Agnifilo.
The experience left him with post-traumatic stress disorder, Agnifilo said.
“Mr. Ng’s cell was covered in rats. There was nothing to stop the rats from coming in. There were rats and there were mosquitoes,” he said. “He was very sick. Without medical care he could die. He asked for medical assistance and for two weeks he got none.”
That torment ended when he was extradited to New York and placed under house arrest, but he was 10,000 miles away from his wife and daughter back in Malaysia, and the COVID-19 epidemic left him isolated, waiting for years for his trial, Agnifilo said.
“Prison for Mr. Ng is going to be different from prison for someone else,” he said. “The PTSD is real... No one should go trough that. Prisoners are not deprived of their family. That’s not what they’re deprived of.”
Ng told the judge the last time he held his daughter was five years ago, the day before his arrest in Malaysia, when she was 6.
He added, “I’m embarrassed. I’m ashamed. I’ve failed and I’ve burdened them. The road ahead is long... It destroys me that my family will further be punished because of me.”
Ng, a citizen of Malaysia, faces prosecution there when his sentence is done.
During the trial, Agnifilo took shots at the credibility of the prosecution’s star witness, Leissner, characterizing him as a a bigamist who forged divorce documents to trick one of his wives into thinking she was his only spouse. Ng, he said, was offered up by Leissner as a scapegoat.
Leissner pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit money laundering and other charges, and is scheduled to be sentenced in September. Goldman Sachs pleaded guilty and returned $2.9 billion, according to prosecutors.. Ng’s family surrendered $35 million the Malaysian government found in 11 separate accounts.
Ng’s face fell as Brodie announced her ruling Thursday.
She said that she factored how he “suffered greatly” into his sentence — which was significantly less than the roughly 20 to 25 years recommended by federal sentencing guidelines.
“By all accounts, this was horrific,” she said, but pointed out that other defendants awaiting trial in jail don’t have the chance to communicate with their family every day the way Ng does with his daughter.
“You read to her every night before she goes to bed, you speak to her every morning,” she said. “It’s not a substitute for being there for your daughter, but it is something.”
The judge added, “There is a critical need to deter crimes of pure greed like this one.”
Agnifilo said he’s “disappointed” by the sentence and he plans to appeal the conviction.
Ng is scheduled to surrender to federal prison authorities on May 4, though his lawyers can still apply to keep him free on bail pending his appeal.
