NINE QUESTIONS FOR SARAWAK REPORT: CURRENT / THE SAUDI GIFT AND THE WAR ON TERROR

👇🏽
– - –

2. RELATED: THE MYSTERY BEHIND A $700M DONATION FROM THE SAUDI ROYALS TO THE MALAYSIAN PM

– - –

SAUDI GIFT FOR MALAYSIA PM NAJIB RAZAK 'FOR ELECTION CAMPAIGN'

The Saudi source said the donation was made amid concern in Riyadh about the influence of the Muslim Brotherhood.

REPORTED BY BBC

The $681m (£479m) deposited in the bank account of Malaysian PM Najib Razak by Saudi Arabia was to help him win the 2013 elections, a Saudi source says.

Malaysia's attorney general cleared Mr Najib of allegations of corruption on Tuesday after ruling that the money was a donation from the Saudi royal family.

Mr Najib had denied that the money came from state investment fund 1MDB.

The Saudi source said the donation was made amid concern in Riyadh about the influence of the Muslim Brotherhood.

At the time, Malaysia's opposition alliance included the Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party (PAS). Its founders were inspired by the Brotherhood, although there is little evidence the Brotherhood actually has much support in Malaysia.

Mr Najib's coalition went on to win the election, but with one of its poorest showings in more than 50 years in power.

The secretive donation to Mr Najib was allegedly paid over in several wire transfers between late March 2013 and early April 2013, just ahead of the election on 5 May.

The well-placed Saudi source, who has asked not to be named, told the BBC the payment was authorised from the very top - from Saudi Arabia's late King Abdullah - with funds coming from both his personal finances and state funds.

Prince Turki bin Abdullah, one of the king's sons, is reported to have had extensive business dealings in Malaysia.

The purpose of the donation was simple, said the Saudi source - it was to help Mr Najib and his coalition win the election, employing a strategic communications team with international experience, focusing on the province of Sarawak, and funding social programmes through party campaigning.

But why should the Saudis care about an election in a non-Arab country more than 6,000 km (3,700 miles) away? The answer, the source said, lay in their concerns over the rising power of the Muslim Brotherhood, which they consider a terrorist organisation.

The Saudis were already upset at events in Egypt, where President Mohammed Morsi was busy consolidating the Brotherhood's hold on the country.

It would be another three months before Mr Morsi was to be deposed by the army, and the Saudis were convinced that the opposition was being supported by the Brotherhood and Qatar, which backed the Brotherhood and other Islamist groups in the Middle East.

'Very murky'

So how unusual is it for the Saudi royal family to hand over this amount of cash in a personal donation? Not at all, said the Saudi insider, adding that Jordan, Morocco, Egypt and Sudan have all been beneficiaries of multi-$100m donations from the Saudi royal purse.

"There is nothing unusual about this donation to Malaysia," he said. "It is very similar to how the Saudis operate in a number of countries."

Saudi Arabia was quick to support the overthrow of Mr Morsi in Egypt, providing the military-backed government with billions of dollars in aid and loans.

Jordan has been the beneficiary of more than $1bn in Saudi development funding, while Riyadh has deposited more than $1bn in Sudan's central bank and signed deals to finance dams on the Nile. Morocco has been provided with oil, financing, investments and jobs in recent years.

However, questions are still being asked about the secretive and convoluted nature of the money transfer, and the fact that Malaysia's prime minister returned 91% of it just four months later. The remaining $61m has not been accounted for.

A British corporate investigator with extensive experience of the Middle East told the BBC that the $681m was paid through the Singapore branch of a Swiss bank owned by the rulers of Abu Dhabi.

"It is very murky," he said. "This case will never be fully cleared up until the Saudis and the Malaysians release all the transaction data, and that has not happened."

There has been growing outrage in some circles in Malaysia that the attorney-general has closed the file on this case and cleared the prime minister of any offences.

Clare Rewcastle Brown, who has reported extensively on the issue for the Sarawak Report, said the claim that the payment to Mr Najib was a Saudi royal donation for political purposes needed to be treated "with considerable caution".

She told the BBC that the $681m was far more likely to be connected to money raised by 1MDB, much of which is reported to have gone missing.

– - –

RELATED (1-2)

[1: CURRENT / CLARE REWCASTLE BROWN'S INTERVIEW ON CHANNEL NEWSASIA REGARDING THE WARRANT FOR HER ARREST – "The Prime Minister has now finally had it announced through the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission that that was not anything to do with 1MDB money, which actually certainly I and I don’t know of any investigative reporters who said it was." - Clare Rewcastle Brown - Channel NewsAsia, August 5, 2015]

[2: 'SENSATIONAL FINDINGS! PRIME MINISTER NAJIB RAZAK’S PERSONAL ACCOUNTS LINKED TO 1MDB MONEY TRAIL - MALAYSIA EXCLUSIVE' - Sarawak Report, July 2, 2015]

– - –

('Saudi gift for Malaysia PM Najib Razak 'for election campaign.' – BBC, January 27, 2016)

– - –
1. SAUDI GIFT FOR MALAYSIA PM NAJIB RAZAK 'FOR ELECTION CAMPAIGN'
2.
– - –

RELATED: THE MYSTERY BEHIND A $700M DONATION FROM THE SAUDI ROYALS TO THE MALAYSIAN PM

REPORTED BY THE HAMILTON SPECTATOR

via THE WASHINGTON POST, January 27, 2016–

Shortly before Malaysia's 2013 election, $681 million was quietly transferred into private bank accounts belonging to Prime Minister Najib Razak. These enormous transfers would later become the subject of scrutiny from Malaysian investigators as they looked at Najib's role in a controversial and debt-heavy government investment fund.

After news of the huge sums broke last year, there were widespread calls for the Malaysian prime minister to step down. This Tuesday, however, an anti-corruption probe finally cleared Najib of wrongdoing. Instead, Malaysia's attorney general revealed that his investigation had found that the money was simply a personal donation from the Saudi royal family and not evidence of corruption.

In a statement published on Facebook, Najib said he welcomed the statement, adding that "no crime was committed" and that the "issue has been an unnecessary distraction for the country."

But the explanation for the money has opened another can of worms: What exactly was almost $700 million worth of Saudi royal money doing in the Malaysian prime minister's private bank accounts?

Najib's statement suggests that the money was "political funding," and Apandi Ali, Malaysia's attorney general, has said that about $620 million of the money was returned to the Saudi royal family in August 2013 because it wasn't used. Apandi suggested that there was no evidence that Najib was even aware of the transfer, and that it was given by the Saudi royal family "without any consideration."

The source of the money had previously been unclear and the focus of speculation for months. In July 2015, the Wall Street Journal reported that investigators believed the money had come from a company registered in the British Virgin Islands via a Swiss bank. Najib had later said that the money came from an unspecified source in the Middle East and was not related to 1MDB, the financially troubled state investment fund he had helped set up.

While Saudi officials have not spoken publicly about the alleged donation, the well-connected BBC correspondent Frank Gardner reports that a Saudi source has told him that the royals did indeed make the donation to Najib — and that the late Saudi King Abdullah was personally involved. The donation was apparently made because of fears that the Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party (PAS), a party inspired by the Muslim Brotherhood, may form part of a new coalition government if Najib's ruling Barisan Nasional coalition lost.

Saudi Arabia has long opposed the political Islam espoused by the Muslim Brotherhood and may have been especially concerned in 2013, when the Muslim Brotherhood still held political power in Egypt. While the link between PAS and the Muslim Brotherhood was relatively tenuous, Gardner's source says the country was used to using large financial donations to influence foreign politics, claiming that Jordan, Morocco, Egypt and Sudan had all received donations from the Saudi royal family that were in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

The Saudi link probably won't be reassuring to many in Malaysia — something Najib seemed to acknowledge with a passage in his statement that talks about reforming political funding in the country. The precise details of the arrangement remain unclear, as does the whereabouts of a $61 million that was not returned. Critics say Najib has already responded to growing political pressure by ousting critics from government and even replacing the previous attorney general who launched the investigation against him.

Political rivals have reacted strongly to the dismissal of charges against Najib. "This can only happen in fairy tales," one opposition leader, Rafizi Ramli, told the website MalaysiaKini. On his Twitter page, jailed opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim said that voters would judge Najib and the attorney general at the next election.