The New York trial that has it all: Hollywood, megayachts, giant sums of money

theguardian.com:

It started, at least in terms of the public’s recognition, with a giant spending spree that reads like a Christmas wishlist for a billionaire.

Picasso’s Women of Algiers for $179m; $100m to fund the production budget of Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street and a $600,000 Oscar statuette given to Marlon Brando for best actor in On the Waterfront – a gift for the movie’s star Leonardo DiCaprio. But it did not stop there: there was also a custom-built megayacht; a Beverly Hills hotel; a $415m stake in EMI music publishing; and a transparent grand piano.

The money had come from 1MDB, a Malaysian sovereign wealth fund connected to Malaysia’s then prime minister, Najib Razak, that had been looted of $4.4bn by then 34-year-old Low Taek Jho, known as Jho Low.

Najib was himself accused of receiving $681m from 1MDB – a claim he has denied – while Low, subject to an Interpol red alert and believed to be in China, struck a deal to return $1bn under the US Kleptocracy Asset Recovery Initiative. Low said the settlement was a “a successful and satisfactory result”.

The astonishing 1MDB swindle has now reached Brooklyn federal court in one of the most remarkable cases to hit New York’s justice system in years. It has it all: Hollywood, corruption, some of the biggest names in arts, business and politics and eye-popping sums of money.

According to prosecutors, Low, and two bankers from Goldman Sachs, the most prestigious of US investment banks which reported $21.64bn in net earnings last year, conspired to pay $1bn in bribes to Malaysian and Abu Dhabi government officials, in order to win Goldman $6.5bn in bond offerings.

For the past two weeks, the one-time Goldman Sachs star banker Tim Leissner, 50, has been testifying against a former