Najib Razak walked into Kajang Prison outside Kuala Lumpur on 23 August 2022, the first Malaysian prime minister ever to be jailed, after the Federal Court upheld a 12-year sentence and a 210 million ringgit fine tied to the looting of a state investment fund he himself had chaired. Investigators had traced roughly $681 million into his personal AmBank accounts, money that prosecutors said originated in 1Malaysia Development Berhad — better known as 1MDB — the sovereign wealth vehicle Najib launched in 2009 to develop the Malaysian economy.
The fund was supposed to build power plants and finance affordable housing. Instead it became the largest kleptocracy case the U.S. Department of Justice had ever pursued, with at least $4.5 billion siphoned through a daisy chain of shell companies, offshore banks, and a Hollywood film studio.
The story is partly about a politician. It is mostly about how a single bank account became the evidentiary spine of a global financial scandal.
The fund that was supposed to build a country
Najib became prime minister of Malaysia in April 2009. Within months he had converted a Terengganu state investment outfit into 1MDB and installed himself as chair of its advisory board, with sign-off authority over major transactions. The pitch was ambitious — strategic infrastructure, partnerships with Gulf sovereign funds, a sovereign wealth approach modeled on Singapore’s Temasek.
Behind the brochures, something else was being built. Between 2009 and 2014, 1MDB raised more than $10 billion in bonds, much of it underwritten by Goldman Sachs, which collected close to $600 million in fees on three bond offerings — an extraordinary multiple of what a sovereign-linked deal would normally pay. Hong Kong regulators later fined Goldman $350 million for its role in the offerings.
Money flowed out of the fund almost as fast as it came in.
The $681 million that arrived by SWIFT transfer
In March 2013, weeks before a general election, two transfers totaling roughly $681 million landed in Najib’s personal accounts at AmBank in Kuala Lumpur. The transfers came through Falcon Private Bank in Singapore, originating from a British Virgin Islands shell called Tanore Finance Corporation.
When the Wall Street Journal first reported the deposits in July 2015, Najib’s office did not deny the money had arrived. The official explanation, repeated for months, was that the funds were a personal donation from the Saudi royal family to support Malaysia’s fight against the Islamic State.
Saudi officials never publicly confirmed the gift. U.S. prosecutors later traced the money back not to Riyadh but to 1MDB itself, routed through a chain of accounts in Switzerland, Luxembourg, and Singapore designed to obscure its origin.
The young financier at the center
The architect of the scheme, according to filings by the U.S. Department of Justice and Malaysian prosecutors, was a Penang-born financier named Low Taek Jho, known as Jho Low. He held no official position at 1MDB. He carried no government title. But he moved between Najib’s inner circle, Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth funds, and Hollywood producers with a fluency that prosecutors described as the operational core of the fraud.
Low spent some of the diverted money on a $250 million superyacht called the Equanimity, on Picassos and Basquiats, on a stake in EMI Music Publishing, and on financing the 2013 film The Wolf of Wall Street through Red Granite Pictures — a company co-founded by Najib’s stepson Riza Aziz. The Department of Justice would later seek to claw back the film’s profits as proceeds of crime.
Low has been a fugitive since 2016. Malaysian authorities believe he is in China. He denies wrongdoing.
How the jewelry box became the smoking gun
When Malaysian police raided properties linked to Najib and his wife Rosmah Mansor in May 2018, days after his shock election defeat to Mahathir Mohamad, the inventory read like an auction catalog. Officers seized 12,000 pieces of jewelry, 567 handbags including 272 Hermès Birkins, 423 watches, and 234 pairs of sunglasses. The total estimated value reached 1.1 billion ringgit, roughly $273 million at the time.
One pink diamond necklace alone was valued at $27 million.
The seizure became a visual shorthand for the case. Physical objects — handbags, watches, real estate — anchor abstract financial crimes in the public imagination in a way that SWIFT codes and shell-company structures never can. A spreadsheet doesn’t make the news. A wall of Birkins does.
The SRC International trial
The 12-year sentence Najib began serving in 2022 stems not from the full 1MDB case but from a smaller subsidiary called SRC International. Prosecutors proved that 42 million ringgit, about $10 million, flowed from SRC into Najib’s personal accounts between 2014 and 2015.
High Court judge Mohamad Nazlan Mohamad Ghazali convicted him on all seven charges in July 2020 — one count of abuse of power, three counts of criminal breach of trust, and three counts of money laundering. The Court of Appeal upheld the verdict in December 2021. The Federal Court, Malaysia’s highest, dismissed his final appeal on 23 August 2022.
He was driven from the courthouse straight to Kajang Prison the same afternoon.
The far larger 1MDB trial — the one dealing directly with the funds that flowed into his personal accounts — ran on for years afterward. On 26 December 2025, the Kuala Lumpur High Court convicted Najib on four counts of abuse of power and 21 counts of money laundering over more than $700 million channeled from 1MDB into his accounts, and sentenced him to a further 15 years in prison along with a fine of 11.4 billion ringgit — the new term to begin only after his current sentence ends. His lawyers filed an appeal against the conviction and sentence within days.
The global recovery effort
The U.S. Department of Justice filed civil forfeiture actions seeking to recover more than $1.7 billion in 1MDB-linked assets — paintings by Van Gogh and Monet, a Bombardier jet, penthouses in New York and London, the Equanimity yacht, and rights to The Wolf of Wall Street. By 2024, settlements and recoveries had returned more than $1 billion to Malaysia.
Switzerland, Singapore, and Luxembourg opened their own investigations. Falcon Private Bank lost its Singapore license. BSI Bank was shuttered. Several private bankers received prison sentences ranging from a few weeks to four and a half years.
Goldman Sachs settled with the U.S. government for $2.9 billion in 2020 — at the time the largest penalty ever paid under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. The bank’s Malaysia unit pleaded guilty. Two former Goldman bankers, Tim Leissner and Roger Ng, were convicted in connection with the scheme.
What the bank account proved
The legal turning point in the SRC case was not testimony or whistleblower documents. It was the bank account itself. Najib’s defense argued he believed the money in his AmBank accounts was a Saudi donation. The court rejected that defense partly because the volume of deposits, withdrawals, and transfers passing through the accounts — and the fact that they continued long after the supposed donation purpose had lapsed — was inconsistent with any innocent reading.
A prime minister with sign-off authority over a sovereign fund, receiving nine-figure sums from offshore shells into his personal account, then spending portions of that money on credit-card bills and political expenses, leaves a paper trail that even sympathetic judges cannot ignore.
The gradual normalization of small ethical breaches can make the larger ones feel routine to the people committing them. A donation here. A consulting fee there. A bank account that no one ever questions.
Life inside Kajang
Najib is now an inmate at Kajang Prison, the same facility that once held opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim on charges Anwar maintained were politically motivated. The symmetry is not lost on Malaysians.
In February 2024, the Pardons Board chaired by then-king Sultan Abdullah halved Najib’s sentence to six years and reduced his fine from 210 million ringgit to 50 million. He then spent more than a year arguing that a royal addendum issued alongside the pardon entitled him to serve the rest of that term at home. In December 2025 the High Court ruled the addendum was not legally enforceable, and in April 2026 Najib withdrew his appeal against that decision, closing off the house-arrest bid.
The transition from high status to incarceration describes a particular kind of disorientation — not just the loss of liberty but the collapse of the deference structures that previously shaped every interaction. For a man who spent nine years as prime minister, addressed as Yang Amat Berhormat, the transition to a numbered uniform and a 6 a.m. roll call is its own kind of sentence.
The number that stays
Of all the figures in the 1MDB case — the $4.5 billion siphoned, the $2.9 billion Goldman penalty, the $1.7 billion in U.S. asset seizures, the 1.1 billion ringgit in jewelry — the one that keeps coming back is the original $681 million that arrived in a politician’s personal bank account in March 2013.
It is a small number compared to the total fraud. It is, by the reckoning of the prosecutors who built the case, among the largest sums ever traced into the personal account of a sitting head of government anywhere in the world.
The wire transfer took seconds. The reckoning took the better part of a decade to reach him. And with a second conviction now stacked on the first — under appeal, but handed down — the years Najib has left in Kajang to think about how it ever got that far stretch well beyond the sentence that first put him there.
