“It’s an administrative process,” he told FMT, adding that it was “nothing important or interesting”.

Yesterday, the Swiss Broadcasting Corporation on its portal swissinfo.ch said the country’s justice minister Simonetta Sommaruga had given authorisation for Justo, who leaked 1MDB-related documents from PetroSaudi International in 2015, to be prosecuted.

This comes amid a debate in Switzerland on the extent to which whistleblowers can be protected in cases involving corporate corruption.

However, Justo said this was “an old fact from 2017” when his family filed criminal complaints against PetroSaudi founder and CEO Tarek Obaid and director Patrick Mahony.

“What they did instead of suing us for defamation is, they filed a complaint against us for industrial espionage,” he said in a recent Facebook post.

Reiterating that he had not stolen any data, he said that was how the justice system works.

“Before being dismissed, it has to go through a lot of channels, particularly in the 1MDB case.”

He added that the issue had been relayed “only by journalists” and that he and his family were never called or asked for any statements.

“This is a non-event, just a PR attempt,” he told FMT.