Shafee coy on Najib appeal withdrawals

Shafee coy on Najib appeal withdrawals

The senior lawyer says he may speak about the matter on a different occasion.

Shafee Abdullah
Najib Razak’s lawyer, Shafee Abdullah, said he is not at liberty to comment, when asked to explain his client’s decision to withdraw appeals over his bid for house arrest and leave to initiate contempt proceedings against former attorney-general Ahmad Terrirudin Salleh.
PUTRAJAYA:
Lawyer Shafee Abdullah today declined to explain why former prime minister Najib Razak withdrew his appeals over his bid for house arrest and leave to initiate contempt proceedings against former attorney-general Ahmad Terrirudin Salleh.

“There are things that are beyond me. I cannot comment. I do not know.

“The correct quotation is: I cannot comment,” he told reporters here after court proceedings.

However, he added that he might speak about the matter on another occasion.

It was earlier reported that Najib had withdrawn his appeal against a High Court decision dismissing his application to serve the remainder of his SRC International prison sentence under house arrest.

A notice of discontinuance was filed by his legal team, Messrs Shafee & Co, on April 3.

Najib is also understood to have withdrawn his application for leave to initiate contempt proceedings against Terrirudin.

The decision to discontinue the appeals was conveyed to the Attorney-General’s Chambers.

On Dec 22, High Court judge Alice Loke dismissed Najib’s application to serve his reduced six-year SRC International sentence under house arrest.

She held that the Federal Territories Pardons Board had considered both a full pardon and a 50% reduction of the prison term, but there was no mention of house arrest during the meeting chaired by the king.

According to Loke, the king made only one decision: to reduce the prison term and fine.

On Dec 26, Putrajaya High Court judge Justice Collin Lawrence Sequerah sentenced Najib to 15 years’ imprisonment and fined him RM11.387 billion after convicting him on all 25 charges of abuse of power and money laundering in the 1MDB case.

He ordered for the sentence to begin in 2028, after Najib completes his six-year SRC International jail term.

The court found Najib guilty of four counts of abuse of power and 21 counts of money laundering involving RM2.28 billion in 1MDB funds deposited into his AmBank accounts between February 2011 and December 2014.

He was sentenced to 15 years’ jail for each abuse of power charge, to run concurrently.

For the 21 money laundering charges, Sequerah imposed five years’ imprisonment for each count, also to run concurrently, and ordered Najib to pay a recoverable sum of RM2.08 billion.

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