Liquidators Angela Barkhouse and Toni Shukla of Kroll Limited said the court ruling allows them to bring further statutory claims against both BSI Bank Ltd and Standard Chartered Plc for allegedly facilitating fraud involving 1MDB.
“Now that these local winding-up orders have been granted, the relevant statutory claims against Standard Chartered and BSI Singapore will be filed in short order.
“This in addition to other ongoing claims brought against these banks, including claims for dishonest assistance, breach of the banks’ duties of reasonable skill and care, and breach of their banking mandate, in respect of the companies now entering liquidation in Singapore.
“This is a positive step forward in the efforts to hold financial institutions and individuals responsible for their role in the large-scale fraud involving 1MDB,” Barkhouse and Shukla said in a statement.
They said their goal is to recover assets from the people and institutions identified as being culpable in the misappropriation of assets from the three BVI companies.
“These are assets which are ultimately traceable to funds that were originally meant to benefit the people of Malaysia but were siphoned off,” said the liquidators.
In July last year, Barkhouse and Shukla sued Standard Chartered and BSI Bank on behalf of the three 1MDB subsidiaries in liquidation.
The suit concerned the banks’ alleged failure to identify and act on red flags in more than 100 intrabank transfers between 2009 and 2013.
The claimants said they lost over US$2.7 billion and S$20 million in public funds from transactions they say violated Singapore’s anti-money laundering rules and due diligence obligations, The Edge reported.
The suit was, however, dismissed by the Singapore Court of Appeal in March, as it upheld that the banks cannot be sued for transactions that took place before 2018, which is when the city-state’s cross-border insolvency law took effect.
The same month, Standard Chartered and BSI Bank failed to be part of winding-up applications for the firms linked to 1MDB, with the High Court ruling that they did not meet the criteria as contingent creditors.
The firms are being liquidated in BVI as part of efforts to recover allegedly misappropriated funds from 1MDB.