NAJIB Razak said his stepson Riza Aziz agreed to a plea bargain settlement so that he would not have to spend the next 10 years of his life in court.

“If you ask me, I would have preferred Riza to continue the process in court. If he continued the process in court, the real facts would have surfaced,” said the former prime minister yesterday on Facebook live.

“For Riza, he has faced this ordeal for five years where he could not start any new business and if the court case were to go on, it might eat up another four years.

“So 10 years, a decade of his life, he cannot do anything. So he said, ‘it’s okay, I will hand over all these assets in the settlement. I want my freedom for me to restart my life.’

“That is his wish. All right, it’s okay. He gave up, you could say, all his assets as long as he got his freedom. It is okay that he has to start his life from scratch, as long as he gets the chance to restart his life.”

Najib said if the case had continued, it would have been established that Riza was not being accused of stealing money.

Najib said Riza was charged under money laundering laws for receiving money linked to 1MDB.

Riza was unaware of the link at the time, Najib said.

“He received the money because he received an investment from Aabar… upon the instructions of the  the United Arab Emirates royal family who said they wanted to invest in his movie productions.

“Aabar is a company with AAA credit rating so when he received the money from Aabar, he thought it really was money from Aabar and the banks did not warn him or raise any red flag to him that this money is related to 1MDB or anything.

“Ss far as Riza was concerned, this was Aabar’s money and no one told him otherwise, so he received it in good faith,” Najib said.

Najib appeared to be saying that Riza had believed he was receiving money from Aabar Investments PJS, which is a subsidiary of International Petroleum International Company (IPIC).

The money that was paid to Riza, however, was from Aabar Investments PJS Ltd, a company registered in the British Virgin Islands.

Riza, who was accused of laundering RM1.25 billion via Red Granite Pictures, the Hollywood production house he co-owned, was last week granted a discharge not amounting to an acquittal in a settlement deal.

Under the terms of the controversial deal, Riza will pay the government an estimated US$107.3 million (RM466 million). – May 22, 2020.