However, the cheques were never cashed, former 1MDB CEO Shahrol Azral Ibrahim Halim said.
He told the court that fugitive financier Low Taek Jho (Jho Low) handed over the cheques to him sometime in September 2010.
The four cheques, dated Sept 6, 2010, were produced in court today.
Shahrol said Jho Low only instructed him to keep the cheques and not to do anything.
“There were subsequently no further instructions. At the end of my tenure (2013) as CEO of 1MDB, I passed it to the finance department for safe-keeping,” he said when examined by ad hoc prosecutor Gopal Sri Ram.
Asked to explain the context, Shahrol said the royal family wanted to donate the money to Yayasan 1MDB after the state investor converted the (1MDB-PetroSaudi International Ltd joint venture) equity to Murabaha notes sometime in September 2009.
“Jho Low later passed me the cheques but they were never encashed,” he said.
Lawyer Muhammad Shafee Abdullah, who is representing Najib, objected to Shahrol’s testimony as it was hearsay evidence.
Sri Ram then told judge Collin Lawrence Sequerah that the prosecution wanted the cheques to be marked as exhibits as Shahrol had received them.
In his opening statement on Aug 28, Sri Ram had said after news of the 1MDB scandal broke in early July 2015, Najib “with his mirror image Jho Low” took steps to cover his tracks.
“Sham documents were produced to pretend a donation from an Arab prince (had been received). Among these were letters and four cheques, each for a sum of US$25 million, purportedly written out by a person said to be the Arab donor.
“But these cheques were never meant to be encashed and were never encashed,” he had said.
Najib is facing 25 charges of money laundering and abuse of power over alleged 1MDB funds in his AmBank accounts.
Shahrol also said he came to know that Najib’s stepson, Riza Aziz (owner and director of Red Granite Pictures), had produced the movie, “Wolf of Wall Street.
“I also read that Red Granite had used money allegedly siphoned from 1MDB,” he said.
Sri Ram also tendered a document to show that Jho Low was the sole beneficiary of Good Star Ltd, a company linked to PetroSaudi.
Shahrol said he had also seen a document which showed that US$10 million had gone from Good Star to Red Granite.
Riza is also facing five counts of money laundering charges amounting to US$248 million (RM1.25 billion) in the Sessions Court here.