$1 billion in embezzled Malaysian funds financed real estate and movie, Justice Department says

Tribune Washington Bureau (TNS)

WASHINGTON - The Justice Department moved Wednesday to seize more than $1 billion in assets that it says were stolen from an investment fund created by the Malaysian government, court filings show.

The embezzled funds were used to purchase high-end real estate in Los Angeles and other cities; hotels; a $35 million jet; and works of art by Vincent van Gogh and Claude Monet, according to court filings. They even were diverted to help finance the 2013 hit film 'The Wolf of Wall Street,” the Justice Department said.

The 1Malaysia Development Berhad fund, also known as 1MDB, was created by the Malaysian government to promote economic development. Instead, the Justice Department said, its officials and their associates stole more than $3.5 billion of the fund's assets from 2009 through 2015, with at least $1 billion of that sum being laundered through the United States.

The fund's officials tried to conceal the money's origins through complex transactions that involved shell companies and bank accounts located in countries across the globe, prosecutors said in court filings.

The civil forfeiture complaints are the largest such action brought under the Kleptocracy Asset Recovery Initiative, a federal effort to recover assets stolen by foreign officials and laundered in the U.S. Those named in the complaint have not been charged with any crimes.

'The use of the diverted 1MDB funds for the personal benefit of the co-conspirators and their associates was not consistent with the purposes for which 1MDB raised the funds, and neither 1MDB nor the government of Malaysia realized any returns on these purchases and expenditures,” the Justice Department wrote in court filings.