Ex-Goldman banker given 10 years in prison for role in 1MDB fraud scandal

theguardian.com:

Roger Ng, the former Goldman Sachs banker at the center of the multi-billion 1MDB embezzlement scandal, was sentenced to 10 years in prison on Thursday, placing a capstone on one of the largest and most bizarre financial frauds of the past decade.

A jury in Brooklyn, New York, found Ng, 50, from Malaysia, guilty of violating US anti-bribery laws, money laundering and illegally skirting Goldman’s accounting controls, after a seven-week trial.

Ng is the only Goldman banker to have been tried and convicted in the scandal. The bank agreed to pay $2.9bn to settle a US-led investigation into its role in 2020.

In a lengthy sentencing hearing defense attorneys requested that judge Margo Brodie release Ng on time served. They argued that Ng had been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder after being held in Malaysian jail where he contracted rat- and mosquito-borne diseases.

“There’s no more deterrence I can think of than putting a Goldman Sachs director in a jail with a hole and contracting malaria and leprosy,” Ng’s attorney Marc Agnifilo said.

But US prosecutors, who had asked for a 15-year sentence, argued that the $35m Ng received in the scheme had not, to their certainty, been recovered.

After passing sentence, Brodie said that a 120-month sentence was “sufficient” to “reflect the seriousness of the crimes” that involved “complex financial deals that raised $6bn, paid $1.6bn in bribes, $1bn in kickbacks – money that was meant to benefit the people of Malaysia.”

After Ng was convicted, Breon Peace, the US attorney for the eastern district of New York, said the justice department was “committed to addressing corporate culture by vigorously combating white-collar crime and holding corrupt individuals who seek to enrich