Najib Razak
Najib Razak was prime minister of Malaysia from 2009 to 2018, the son of the second prime minister, Abdul Razak, and nephew of the third, Hussein Onn, who had entered parliament at twenty-three in his dead father's seat in 1976 and held every great office before the top one. His premiership is remembered for 1MDB, the sovereign wealth fund he founded in 2009 and chaired, from which four and a half billion dollars were taken, by the American Justice Department's count, by his associate Jho Low and others, to buy hotels, a yacht, a jet, a Monet, a Picasso, and the film The Wolf of Wall Street. Six hundred and eighty-one million dollars passed through his personal account in 2013, which he said was a donation from a Saudi prince. The government's own attorney-general cleared him in 2016 after he had dismissed the previous one and the deputy prime minister who had asked. The election of May 2018, which he lost to the ninety-two-year-old Mahathir and the coalition Mahathir had made with his old enemy Anwar, was the first time the Malay party had lost since independence. He was born in Kuala Lipis in Pahang in 1953, studied industrial economics at Nottingham. He was chief minister of Pahang at twenty-nine and a federal minister at thirty-three, holding youth, education, defence, in which he bought the Scorpène submarines whose commissions became a French investigation, and finance. He was deputy prime minister from 2004 under Abdullah Badawi, whom he replaced in April 2009 after the election of 2008 had cost the coalition its two-thirds. The premiership had also the 1Malaysia slogan of national unity, the cash handouts to the poor before elections, the goods and services tax of 2015 that the country hated. There were the two Malaysia Airlines disasters of 2014, MH370 lost in the Indian Ocean and MH17 shot down over Ukraine, and the Sedition Act used against cartoonists. There was the election of 2013 in which his coalition lost the popular vote and kept the seats. The police found in his homes after the defeat two hundred and seventy million dollars in cash, jewellery and handbags. He was convicted in July 2020 on seven counts in the first of five trials and sentenced to twelve years. He began serving it in August 2022 when the last appeal failed, had it halved by the pardons board in 2024. He is fighting to serve the rest under house arrest, while the trials on the larger sums go on.
- Lived: 1953 CE – ?
- Nationality: Malaysian
- Roles: prime minister, politician
