Ng said he needed three months to allow his wife and daughter to arrive in New York from Malaysia, Bloomberg reported.

On March 9, US District judge Margo Brodie sentenced Ng to 10 years in prison and ordered him to surrender to federal prison officials on May 4.

Yesterday, Ng’s lawyer, Marc Agnifilo, asked the court to allow his client to delay his sentence until August.

Agnifilo said Ng hadn’t seen his daughter, who is now 10, for more than four years since his arrest in Malaysia in 2018.

He added that Ng, who agreed to be extradited to the US to face a trial in New York in early 2019, also faces prosecution in Malaysia once he is released.

“Due to the amount of time he has spent away from his minor child, and the length of his sentence, we respectfully request that he be able to spend two months with his family before he surrenders,” Agnifilo was quoted as saying.

The lawyer argued that his client had been free on house arrest and wore an electronic ankle bracelet to monitor his movement since a federal magistrate in Brooklyn agreed to release him on US$20 million (RM89.21 million) bail in May 2019, and had never violated the conditions of his release.

Agnifilo said prosecutors objected to delaying the sentence.

Last April, a jury in federal court in the New York City borough of Brooklyn found Ng, Goldman’s former head of investment banking in Malaysia, guilty of helping his former boss, Tim Leissner, embezzle money from 1MDB, launder the proceeds and bribe government officials to win business.

The charges stem from some US$6.5 billion in bonds that Goldman helped 1MDB to sell in 2012 and 2013. 1MDB was a sovereign wealth fund that was founded to finance development projects in Malaysia.

US prosecutors said US$4.5 billion of that sum was embezzled by officials, bankers and their associates, in one of the biggest scandals in Wall Street history.