..
Deloitte to pay Malaysia $80mn for its role in pilfering
of state fund 1MDB
3 Mar, 2021 15:01
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia © Pixabay.com
Deloitte will pay Malaysia’s government $80 million to resolve all claims related to its auditing of accounts of scandal-linked state fund 1MDB and its unit SRC International from 2011 to 2014.
The Finance Ministry said on Wednesday that “The successful out-of-court settlement with Deloitte will expedite the payment of monies to fulfill 1MDB and SRC’s outstanding obligations, which would otherwise be delayed by potentially protracted and costly court battles.”
Deloitte has been under scrutiny for its role in auditing the financial statements of the 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB) state fund. The multibillion-dollar scandal involved top Malaysian officials, including former Prime Minister Najib Razak, who was sentenced to 12 years in jail after being convicted on charges related to theft from the fund.
In 2019, Malaysia’s securities regulator fined Deloitte 2.2 million ringgit (about $543,000) for failing to report irregularities in relation to an Islamic bond issued by a 1MDB-linked company. After the US Justice Department filed civil lawsuits in 2016 over 1MDB, Deloitte said the 1MDB financial statements it had audited should no longer be relied upon.
Malaysian and US authorities estimate that at least $4.5 billion was stolen from 1MDB between 2009 and 2014 by senior officials of the fund and their associates.
In October, Goldman Sachs (Asia), which was the main banker for the fund and helped it to raise $6.5 billion through bond sales, was fined $350 million by Hong Kong’s Securities and Futures Commission for its role in the corruption saga. The fine is the highest ever imposed by the Hong Kong markets’ watchdog.
The money siphoned off from Malaysia’s state coffers was used to buy everything from artwork and jewelry to real estate and a superyacht. Some of the cash helped to finance the movie ‘The Wolf of Wall Street’, which earned actor Leonardo DiCaprio a Golden Globe for his performance as a stock market scammer.
Scandal over face mask business deals forces German MP
from Angela Merkel’s party to quit
7 Mar, 2021 20:23
German MP Nikolas Löbel, a member of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s CDU party, will quit parliament and not seek re-election. The reason? A series of deals on protective face masks that landed Löbel around €250,000.
As the coronavirus pandemic took hold in Germany, a company owned by Löbel brokered deals between a Chinese face-mask manufacturer and healthcare companies in the cities of Heidelberg and Mannheim. The contracts netted the 34-year-old MP a cool €250,000 ($298,000), Der Spiegel reported on Friday.
Löbel, who initially defended his deal as “in line with the market,” was bombarded with calls to resign, and on Sunday announced that he would retire from politics at the end of August, and from the CDU and its sister party, the CSU, immediately.
“Being a member of the German Bundestag and being able to represent my home city of Mannheim, there is a great honor and special moral duty,” he wrote in an apology statement to German media. “I take responsibility for my actions and draw the necessary political consequences.”
Löbel’s August retirement date wasn’t soon enough for his opponents, who continued to press for his immediate resignation. After a meeting on Sunday afternoon, his own party sided with the opposition, demanding that Löbel “complete this withdrawal from all offices and mandates” by the end of March.
By Saturday evening, it was still unclear whether Löbel would honor his party’s demand.
Löbel is not the first CDU politician embroiled in a mask-supply scandal. Georg Nüsslein, a CSU lawmaker from Bavaria, has been accused of lobbying the government on behalf of a mask supplier last year, earning €660,000 ($800,000) that he then didn’t pay tax on.
Nüsslein denied any wrongdoing, but resigned on Friday from his post within the CDU/CSU parliamentary group, and announced that he would not seek reelection in September.
No comments:
Post a Comment