Johari said there were seven or eight international banks involved in the matter.

“Foreign banks that facilitated transactions without adhering to the KYC standard are the reason why the money was channelled to the wrong places,” he said.

He said this in an exclusive interview with RTM1.

However, Johari said nothing has been finalised yet, as the government is fully focused on the arbitration case against investment bank Goldman Sachs.

“We want to get as much as we can from the 2020 settlement. Bear in mind that we are not making profits out of the recovery, we are still losing.”

As part of the 2020 settlement with Malaysia, Goldman Sachs made an initial US$2.5 billion payment in September of that year.

It also guaranteed the return of US$1.4 billion of 1MDB assets seized by authorities worldwide in exchange for Malaysia agreeing to drop criminal charges against the firm and not to bring on new ones.

The bank was also required to make an interim payment of US$250 million if Malaysia did not receive at least US$500 million of assets and proceeds by August 2022, according to Goldman Sachs.

In October, the company sued the government at the London International Court of Arbitration following a disagreement over the US$500 million settlement terms.

Goldman Sachs claimed that the US$500 million threshold had been met.