Malaysian prosecutors have said some $4.5 billion were stolen from the 1MDB (1Malaysia Development Berhad) state fund, which was co-founded in 2009 and was supposed to promote development when Najib Razak was the prime minister.

“We find the appeal devoid of any merits. We find the conviction and sentence to be safe,” Chief Justice Maimun Tuan Mat said on Tuesday on behalf of a five-judge panel, adding: “Based on the foregoing, it is our unanimous view that the evidence led during the trial points overwhelmingly to guilt on all seven charges.”

Much of the money raised was allegedly embezzled. The US Justice Department says that some $2.7 billion of the $6.5 billion the Goldman Sachs Group (a global investment banking, securities and investment management firm) helped raise for 1MDB was stolen by people connected to Najib and diverted for bribes, a luxury yacht, fine art, and even funding for the Martin Scorsese film “The Wolf of Wall Street.”

Najib’s loss in his final appeal indicates that he will have to begin serving his sentence immediately, becoming the first former prime minister to be jailed. The former prime minister has been on bail since 2018, pending the appeal as an appellate court in December denied his appeal, prompting him to go to the Federal Court for a final recourse.

A lower court in July 2020 found Najib guilty of abuse of power, money laundering, and criminal breach of trust over the transfer of $10.1m (42 million Malaysian ringgit) from SRC International, a former unit of 1MDB, to his personal bank account.

The Chief Justice commented that “it would have been a travesty of justice of the highest order if any reasonable tribunal, faced with such evidence staring it in the face, were to find that the appellant is not guilty of the seven charges preferred against him”.

The Federal Court decision was handed down after a tribunal threw out a last-minute move by Najib’s lawyers to protest the chief justice from hearing the case, alleging bias on her part. 

Najib is a UK-educated son of one of Malaysia’s founding fathers who had been groomed for the prime minister’s post from a young age.