I was offered $2m for stolen data: Justo

SWISS national Xavier Andre Justo – being detained in Bangkok for allegedly trying to blackmail his former employer, claims he was promised US$2 million (Bt68 million) in exchange for data he had stolen from his former employer PetroSaudi.
He also told The Straits Times that he was never paid what he was promised by a prominent Malaysian businessman. It is believed that this businessman wanted to use the data to discredit the Malaysian premier.
Justo claimed a deal was reached in Singapore in February on the sale of the documents, which was followed by lengthy discussions on how he would be paid. The group of people he met in Singapore to negotiate the sale of the data were named in a 22-page confession Justo made to Thai police. He showed a copy of the confession to The Straits Times.
“I tried to open an account in Singapore, to have the money paid directly from [the buyer’s] account,” Justo said. “DBS Bank refused, I don’t know why. After that I opened an account in Abu Dhabi in my own name, which was refused by [the buyer] because it had my name on it.
“Then I tried to use my company account in Hong Kong and he said the same, after that it was through a Luxembourg company and then again [the buyer] refused and after that Clare Brown took the lead,” he said.
He was referring to Clare Rewcastle-Brown, the Malaysian-born British-based editor of Sarawak Report, which over the past year has made astonishing claims about the misappropriation of billions at state investment firm 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB), whose advisory board is headed by Prime Minister Najib Razak.
Justo claimed the buyer also “offered to pay me by cash”.
He said: “So I was supposed to go to Singapore every week or every other week to receive an envelope with a few thousand or tens of thousands, and repeat this process for months until the final amount will have been paid. And again I refused.”
Justo echoed what Thai police said last week – that his confession was backed up by documents, including a record of his WhatsApp conversations with the buyers.
“All of what is written in my confession, most of it is proven by e-mail conversations, WhatsApp messages I have had with [them].”
Rewcastle-Brown had agreed to receive the $2 million from the buyer and send him $250,000 a month for consultancy services, he claimed.
“I don’t know if she received the money or not, [because] I was arrested,” he said. “I have no idea.”
Contacted by The Straits Times, Rewcastle-Brown rubbished the allegations as “bunkum”.
“What I have presented on 1MDB and has been clarified by The Edge and corroborated by several other official sources is a coherent explanation of events, versus the dodging, changing stories of 1MDB,” she said.
Meanwhile, Agence France-Presse reported that Malaysian authorities have suspended the publication of The Edge, a move that the newspaper and media groups decried yesterday as a grave breach of press freedom.
In a notice dated Thursday, the Home Ministry suspended the publishing permits of The Edge Media Group for three months, saying its reporting on the 1MDB scandal threatened “public order”.
“This is nothing more than a move to shut us down in order to shut us up,” group’s CEO Ho Kay Tat said.
Earlier this week the government also blocked the UK-based website Sarawak Report, which also has published extensive reports on the scandal.
Ho Kay Tat was also questioned by Malaysian police yesterday over the articles.
On Monday, in a note published on the front page of his daily, Ho said the newspaper had “a public duty to find and report the truth”.
“We were not involved in any theft, we did not pay anyone, and we did not tamper [with] any of the e-mails and documents we were given,” he said.
He said the newspaper was handing Malaysian government investigators printed documents and a hard disk that contains bank transfers and statements linked to the 1MDB scandal.
Justo also claimed that the group he met in Singapore – including Rewcastle-Brown – had tampered with the data he had given them. “I gave the original documents without any kind of alteration,” he alleged.
“I can say that I gave those documents to two groups of people. One was Rewcastle-Brown and ‘her IT guy’ and the other was the Malaysian businessman and his colleague.”
The Straits Times is not naming the businessman or his colleague until they respond to the latest allegations.
Justo alleged that the people he met had talked about using the documents “to try to bring down the Malaysian government”, adding that they also referred to plans to “modify the documents”.
Rewcastle-Brown vehemently refuted that allegation, saying Justo was “full of untruths”.
She said: “Why would I wish to alter anything? If I had, why haven’t 1MDB and PetroSaudi brought out the evidence of such altering in all of the last five or so months?”