Dramatis Personae
Tarek Obaid was born in Beirut on 23 October 1975. He has Swiss and Saudi nationalities. He founded PetroSaudi International [PSI] in 2005 together with Prince Turki bin Abdullah bin Abdulaziz al Saud. Obaid was a director of PSI AS Group incorporated on 21 November 2007 in Saudi Arabia. He was CEO of PetroSaudi International incorporated on February 24 2009 in the Cayman Islands.
Prince Turki was the son of the late King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz al Saud. He was the chairman of the board of directors of PSI. According to the Swiss indictment, he did not exercise any operational activity in the PetroSaudi Group. Jho Low arranged for Prince Turki to meet Najib Razak in August 2009.
Patrick Mahony is a Swiss British Citizen and aged 46 (born 10 July 1977) . Mahony obtained a degree from the University of London before joining Goldman Sachs in Hong Kong, Blackstone in Hong Kong and New York, until 2001. He went to work for Stephens Financial Group until 2004 and then Ashmore in the City of London until 2009. Mahony joined PetroSaudi in September 2009. Mahony was introduced by Obaid to Jho Low shortly after joining PetroSaudi.
Mahony bought a house in Ladbroke Square for £6.2 million through BVI shell companies called Mika 1 and Mika 2. The funds were traced money traced to the $700 million stolen from 1MDB. He also had constructed a giant chalet Gstaad and lived the high life in Switzerland.
Mahony (together with Obaid) bought a chain of private schools called Bellevue [Bellevue Education International Ltd] using their Hong Kong companies Plato One and Plato Two, in which they were joint shareholders and through Obaid’s company Maplehill Property Ltd.
Xavier Justo was a director of PetroSaud, first in Geneva and then in London. He had a dispute wih Tarek Obaid and quit the company. PatroSaudi’s IT consultant and Justo’s friend gave Justo the company’s hard drive containing some 230,000 emails. These detailed the conversations that described the scam and are the key evidence for the 1MDB revelations and exposure. Justo was subsequently imprisoned in Thailand, at Mahony’s instigation, for over a year. He now lives in Spain.
Nawaf Obaid, Tarek’s brother, promoted Tarek’s interests, made connections for him and smeared his critics in the West and Saudi Arabia, even getting Saudi ministers to participate in the cover-up of where the 1MDB money had gone.
Najib Razak (properly known as Mohammad Najib bin Tun Haji Abdul Razak) was the sixth Prime Minister of Malaysia from 2009 to 2018.
A Malaysian court convicted Najib (by then desposed as prime minister of Malaysia) of corruption in 2020 in connection with 1MDB, and sentenced to 12 years in prison. This sentence was subsequently halved.
Jho Low arranged for Najib to meet Prince Turki on the yacht called Alfa Nero in the second part of August 2009. According to the indictment in the Swiss court, Jho Low acted as an unofficial consultant and and confidant of Najib Razak and his wife, Rosmah Mansor”.