Ex-Goldman banker Roger Ng’s wife, Hwee Bin Lim, took the stand on Monday to testify in favor of the defendant, calling the $35 million allegedly looted from the 1MDB fraud a business investment with Tim Leissner’s former wife.
Hwee Bin Lim said that money received from Tim Leissner’s ex-wife Judy Chan Leissner was for a «return on my investment», according to a «Bloomberg» report.
Lim claims that shortly after her husband Roger Ng began working for Leissner in the mid-2000s, she invested 48 million yuan – about $6 million at the time – in Chan Leissner’s family businesses which included China’s largest vineyard.
Lim-Chan Leissner Friendship
According to Lim, the business venture followed a newly formed friendship with Chan Leissner after their husbands started working as colleagues in 2005 with the two often socializing and spending time at a health club.
The friendship would eventually lead to the $6 million investment in Chan Leissner’s family businesses which grew considerably before it was discovered that Leissner had an affair with Datuk Rohana Rozhan, ex-CEO of media firm Astro Malaysia Holdings.
Rohana Affair
Lim’s investment with Chan Leissner came to an end in 2011 after she discovered the affair which Ng and his wife had already known about.
According to Lim, Chan Leissner called her and «went ballistic» over the affair and asked for divestment of the investment which had grown to about $26 million at that point. Although Lim had hoped to grow the investment more with an IPO that Chan Leissner’s family was planning for the vineyard, Leissner’s then-wife insisted on returning the money.
Her brother would then set up a UBS account for the money in Singapore and an offshore entity, both in their mother’s name, in May 2012.
