Following a report by Nirmal Gosh of the Singaporean Straits Times, in which arrested former PetroSaudi executive Xavier Andre Justo claimed he was offered USD2 million (RM7.63 million) by a Malaysian businessman in return for documents detailing the laundering of some RM6.9 billion from sovereign development fund 1MDB to Jho Low and PetroSaudi bosses, the publisher and chairperson of The Edge financial paper have come forward to admit that they were who Justo was referring to – but asserted that they did not pay Justo the money.
In an open letter published on both The Edge and its sister site The Malaysian Insider, the financial paper’s chairperson, Tong Kooi Ong and its publisher Ho Kay Tat, admitted to offering the Swiss national, now under arrest in Bangkok for attempted blackmail against his former employers, USD2 million in exchange for leaked documents that became the basis of their exposé on 1MDB’s shady dealings on Monday.
The article, titled “How Jho Low & PetroSaudi schemed to steal money from the people of Malaysia via 1Mdb”, described how some USD1.83 billion in 1MDB funds were laundered into the personal coffers of Malaysian billionaire Low Taek Jho and two PetroSaudi bosses, Tarek Obaid and Patrick Mahony, from 2009 to 2011.
Tong and Ho assert that Justo’s claim of having been offered the USD2 million, but never actually getting paid, was confirmation of The Edge‘s previous statement that it did not pay anyone for the information it presented in its report.
They acknowledged that Justo must feel cheated at the paper’s move to deceive him.
“Justo is obviously an angry man, and understandably so, as we did not pay him what he wanted,” they wrote.
“Yes, we misled him. But that was the only way to get hold of the evidence to expose how a small group of Malaysians and foreigners cheated the people of Malaysia of USD1.83 billion (RM6.9 billion).”
The two also insisted that the documents they procured from Justo were not tampered with in anyway, “… because we immediately did a digital fingerprint of the hard disc that contained over 400,000 emails and documents and secured it.
“What is in the discs we gave Bank Negara Malaysia, the police and the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission this week is the exact copy of the one Justo passed to us, and he has said he did not tamper with it.”
They stand by the paper’s report saying that the money trail they pieced together from the leaked documents will show that 1MDB funds were indeed transferred to the accounts of several people in bank accounts across the globe – information that can be easily verified, they claim, by investigators who are willing to look.
At the end of their letter, both Tong and Ho admit to no wrongdoing, and reiterate their desire to assist federal investigators probing the 1MDB case.
