Goldman Sachs demands the prison sentence for 1MDB fraudsters Timothy Leissner

Goldman Sachs asked a federal judge in Brooklyn to throw the book with a shameful former partner who cost the Wall Street Investment Banking Giant billions of dollars of fines about a foreign bribe scandal.

The top lawyer of Wall Street Giant fired a letter to US district judge Margo Brodie on Thursday, who condemned Timothy Leissner, the 53-year-old banker born in Germany, because he had “lied to and deceived many people in society”.

Leissner, Goldman's former boss in Southeast Asia, is to be convicted next week after he was guilty of almost 3 billion US dollars in 2018 due to crimes as part of the Bilking of the Malaysia Soverägn Wealth Fund.

He looks at a maximum prison sentence of 25 years – although the public prosecutors of the Ministry of Justice are asking Brodie to dispose of him if she sentenced her prison on May 29.

“At the inspection of these crimes, Mr. Leissner deceived his colleagues for years and culminated in his 156-year history in the only criminal proceedings against Goldman Sachs,” wrote the General Advisor of Goldman, Kathryn H. Ruemler, in a letter to the judge.

“He never recognized, let alone the responsibility for the extraordinary damage and the reputation damage, which he stimulated Goldman Sachs and his many partners and colleagues who trusted him.”

The Goldman lawyer wrote that the bank “take[s] Problem with “Leisner's attempt to explain his misconduct in relation to the supposed pressure that Goldman Sachs exercised on him to generate business.”

According to Ruemmler, Leisser has also rejected Goldman Sachs's efforts to reset the compensation that he received when working on the 1MDB bond transactions, although Goldman Sachs's right to recovery this compensation was clearly stated in Mr. Leissner's employment contract. “

In October 2023, a federal judge of Manhattan Leisner, Goldman, ordered 20.7 million US dollars to pay refund, but the bank said that she was not “repaid a penny”.

Ruemmler's letter was written in response to a recipient of the judgment submitted by public prosecutors from the Ministry of Justice, in which the judge was asked for leniency, with a comprehensive cooperation in the study.

According to lawyers from the Ministry of Justice, Leissner's help to convict his former colleague Roger NG and contributed to the fact that Goldman Sachs paid a penalty of 2.9 billion dollars.

“While Mr. Leissner only testified in a single legal proceedings, in the USA against Roger NG, the information he provided, numerous and powerful people paid: Sheikhs from Abu Dhabi with immense wealth and state power.

They added: “This reality is unnecessary for Mr. Leissner's additional punishment. A time penalty is sufficient, but not greater than for Tim Leissner.”

Leissner led three bond offers of a total of 6.5 billion US dollars for 1MDB in 2012 and 2013.

Instead of financing development projects, over 2.7 billion US dollars for bribery and financing extravagant lifestyles were undermined, including luxury imposition, art and even the production of Hollywood films such as “The Wolf of Wall Street”.

Leissner admitted to personally between 50 and 60 million US dollars.

He also confessed to forging documents and creating fake email accounts to deceive colleagues and his then wife Kimora Lee Simmons about his marital status.

Post has obtained a comment from the Ministry of Justice and Leisner's lawyer Henry Mazurek.

Mazurek announced Bloomberg News on Thursday that “Goldman Sachs' Chuzpah is astonishing today.”

“Mr. Leissner has brought together in recent years to work with the Ministry of Justice in order to uncover the corporate culture and institutional greed, which heated up the behavior that the 1MDB project falsified,” said Mazurek in an explanation.

Goldman rejected a statement.