1MDB scandal: banker’s ex-wife says US$93 million US wants belongs to her

Kimora Lee, the former model and ex-wife of former Goldman Sachs banker Tim Leissner, claims that shares worth about US$93 million that he was ordered to forfeit as part of his 1MDB guilty plea actually belong to her.

Lee asked a federal judge in Brooklyn, New York, on Friday to hold a hearing where she intends to establish she rightfully owns 892,732 shares in Celsius Holdings, a fitness drink maker. She claims she bought the shares with money she earned from her modelling career and her Baby Phat clothing line.

The shares were wrongly included in a March federal order requiring Leissner to surrender more than 3.3 million Celsius shares as proceeds of his crimes, Lee claims.

Leissner, Goldman Sach’s former Southeast Asia head, pleaded guilty in 2018 to conspiring with financier Jho Low, the alleged mastermind of the sprawling fraud scheme, to bribe officials in Malaysia and Abu Dhabi to facilitate bond deals. Low, who remains a fugitive, pocketed US$1.42 billion from the fraud, the US has said.

“Lee has established that she is a bona fide purchaser for value of the Celsius shares”, she said in the filing. “Leissner did not contribute any funds to the purchase of the Celsius shares and did not own the Celsius shares. The fact that the Celsius shares were used as collateral for Leissner’s bond does not mean that there is a connection between Leissner’s offences and those shares which were seized”.

Shares in the company traded at US$104.26 Friday in New York, making the 3.3 million shares worth more than US$344 million.

Leissner, who was the government’s star witness at a trial of his former subordinate, Roger Ng, was also ordered in March to surrender US$43.7 million in cash in addition to the shares.