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It seemed like a facetious question, intended to provoke the star witness, "Do you think you're good at lying?"
However, it is the key to what is likely to be the only trial on U.S. soil in one of the largest international kleptocracy cases in history, the looting of billions of dollars from the people of Malaysia.
A former Goldman Sachs banker, Roger Ng, is accused of participating in a bribery and kickback scheme that enabled the fraud, which looted more than US$4 billion from a Malaysian sovereign wealth fund and purchased jewelry, art and real estate.
Ng's former boss at Goldman, Tim Leissner, was for years one of Goldman Sachs' most powerful dealmakers in Asia. Now, he is the government's key witness, and an admittedly prolific fabricator. On the stand in a Brooklyn federal courtroom, he acknowledged misleading co-workers, investigators and his three wives. But when Ng's lawyer needled him with the question of whether he's a good liar, Leissner coolly replied, "I don't think so."
Leissner's 10 days of testimony, including six days of blistering cross-examination, exposed the details of a global fraud that toppled Malaysia's prime minister and forced Goldman Sachs, one of the world's most prestigious financial institutions, to appear before a U.S. judge and admit, for the first time in its 153-year history, that it was guilty of a crime.
The question was also for the jurors: How much of what Mr. Leissner said was true?
Leissner acknowledged in court that he has "lied a lot," including presenting a fake divorce decree to his now estranged wife, model and fashion designer Kimora Lee Simmons, to marry him eight years ago. But he insists he is telling the truth about Ng, who prosecutors say helped line the pockets of officials in Abu Dhabi and powerful Malaysians close to then-Prime Minister Najib Razak.
Money looted from the sovereign wealth fund "1Malaysia Development Berhad," or 1MDB, financed a...