The series of forfeiture lawsuits recently filed by the Justice Department against those alleged to have looted the Malaysian sovereign wealth fund 1MDB will continue to be mined for information for some time to come. With the Complaint coming in at 136 pages, there is a wealth of information on the first and third parties involved in the massive fraud and how they accomplished it. It will be most interesting to see what might be the fallout for those parties.
One of the most prominent third parties named in the filings is the New York law firm of Shearman and Sterling, a white shoe firm if there ever was one. However as reported in the Wall Street Journal, the filings laid bare “the purported role that a Shearman & Sterling LLP trust account played in a range of multimillion-dollar deals funded with allegedly dirty money.”
