A former Goldman Sachs banker found guilty of helping perpetrate a massive, mutli-billion-dollar fraud from a Malaysian development fund will spend 10 years in prison, a federal judge in Brooklyn ruled Thursday.
Roger Ng, 51, conspired with colleague Tim Leissner and Malaysian socialite Jho Low to convince the New York-based bank to raise billions in cash in 2012 for 1MDB, a Malaysian fund meant to help the country’s economy, prosecutors said. A jury found him guilty last April.
All the while, Ng and his cohorts secretly bribed high-level officials in Malaysia and the United Arab Emirates to steal more than $1 billion from the fund for their own use, paying for lavish parties, chartered private jets, yachts and six-carat diamond rings.
Some of the pilfered cash was even used to fund the “Wolf of Wall Street” starring Leonardo DiCaprio, according to the feds.
“This is one of the biggest financial crimes in the history of the world,” Brooklyn Federal Court Judge Margo Brodie said as she handed down her sentence. “It has been difficult to fully grasp the complexity, the scope and the impact of this financial bribery scheme.”
Ng was pulling in more than $1 million a year through his job and still decided to take in $35 million from the scam, prosecutors said in a sentencing memo filed this month.
“Despite the fact that you had a great job, made good money, and would have been comfortable, the only explanation for your conduct is greed,” Brodie said.
Low, the alleged mastermind, is still on the run from the law.
Ng’s defense lawyers were asking for a sentence of time served. He spent six months in a Malaysian jail after his arrest in 2018, and during that time, he contracted malaria and a possibly fatal bacterial disease spread through the urine of infected rats.
The experience left him with post-traumatic stress disorder, said his lawyer, Marc Agnifilo. “Mr. Ng’s cell was covered in rats. There was nothing to stop the rats from coming in. There were rats and there were mosquitoes,” he said. “He was very sick. Without medical care he could die. He asked for medical assistance and for two weeks he got none.”
That torment ended when he was extradited to New York and placed under house arrest, but he was 10,000 miles away from his family back in Malaysia, and the COVID epidemic left him isolated, waiting for years for his trail, which took place in 2022, Agnifilo said.