Lawyer Urges Transparency from Govt After 1MDB Spent Over RM300 MILLION in Just Legal Fees Since 2019

Recently, The Edge reported that 1Malaysia Development Bhd (1MDB) had spent over RM300 million from August 2019 to August 2024 on legal fees in an effort to recover its assets.

Afidah Azwa Abdul Aziz, who is part of the Ministry of Finance’s Strategic Investments Division and the current director of 1MDB, told this to the High Court when she testified in 1MDB’s US$6.59 billion lawsuit against its former CEO Arul Kanda Kandasamy and board chairman Tan Sri Irwan Serigar Abdullah.

The exact sum is RM313.81 million, which allegedly came from the 1MDB Assets Recovery Trust Account, which is the account where money from 1MDB’s various settlements with Goldman Sachs, Abu Dhabi’s International Petroleum Investment Co (IPIC), KPMG and Deloitte were channelled to.

Following this, legal practitioner Haniff Khatri Abdulla took to his Facebook page to call for the Ministry of Finance to disclose details of these legal fees.

“As a result of the disclosure by a 1MDB official regarding legal expenses since 2019, which has reached more than RM 300 million, it is important for the relevant parties at the Ministry of Finance to provide details related to the name of the lawyer, the amount of payment, the date of payment and how the payment was made,”

“It is the right of the people to know this important matter as 1MDB, at all material times, is an entity owned by the people of Malaysia, which has already suffered billions of ringgit in losses and will still face difficulties in recovering all its assets later,” he wrote.

He went on to emphasise that it is his personal and professional right to ask for the disclosure of such information.

Would you be interested in knowing how the RM300 million was spent on legal fees by 1MDB to recover their assets? Do feel free to share your thoughts in the comment section.

Also read: “Where is JAKIM?” – M’sians Angered By RM25 Mil Allocation for GISBH Kids’ Recovery Program