This article first appeared in The Edge Malaysia Weekly on December 2, 2019 - December 8, 2019

The decision by the UK Court of Appeal in favour of Malaysia’s application to have our challenge — against a US$5.78 billion consent award to Abu Dhabi’s International Petroleum Investment Corp (IPIC) that was agreed to by the previous government — heard in open court should be welcomed.

Attorney-General Tan Sri Tommy Thomas had taken the bold decision to fight for the right to have the suit against the consent award heard in open court so that the legal arguments by both sides could be made in a transparent manner.

The London case is one of a series of legal and regulatory probes around the world into the  1Malaysia Development Bhd (1MDB).

The court proceedings were filed in October 2018 on the grounds that the consent award, done in 2017, was engineered by the then prime minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak and others as part of a conspiracy to defraud 1MDB and its shareholder, the Minister of Finance Inc.

Najib was “principally responsible” for consenting to the US$5.78 billion award and he “could not possibly have acted in the best interests of his country and his company”, Thomas had said at the time the suit was filed.

IPIC had co-guaranteed two separate dollar-denominated bonds for 1MDB in 2012 in deals arranged by Goldman Sachs Group Inc that raised US$3.5 billion.

When 1MDB defaulted on one interest payment in 2015, IPIC stepped in to pay, but that triggered a series of complex structures that ended up with Malaysia signing the 2017 consent award to pay IPIC up to US$5.78 billion. Malaysia had paid IPIC as much as US$1.2 billion by the time the suit against the consent award was filed last year.

Thomas said billions of dollars of taxpayers’ money had been misappropriated in the course of the 1MDB scandal and the new government is “committed, in the public interest, to setting this right and will unrelentingly pursue those who are responsible for this grievous injustice”.

While the legal challenge is far from over, at least we will now get to know the facts of the case because of the open court hearing instead of the closed door arbitration that IPIC wanted.

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