5 Biggest Bribery Cases in Business History

4. The 1MDB Fund

The story of the 1MDB Fund is so incredible, that it has had movies and documentaries made about it. While a political scandal at the heart of it, this wouldn’t have been possible without corruption and bribery from corporations, including Goldman Sachs (NYSE:GS). 1MDB was a government run development company, whose funds were transferred by a prominent businessman to the tune of $700 million at least into his own bank accounts. The then Malaysia Prime Minister Najib Razak was involved as well, with assets and cash worth tens of millions of dollars recovered from his home. The company showed debts of close to $12 billion, of which around $3 billion were due to a state-issued bond, at the center of which was Goldman Sachs, which made hundreds of millions of dollars in fees from the bond issue. The money was even used to finance The Wolf of Wall Street.

The end result of the scandal being exposes was Najib being removed from the post of Prime Minister, with Mahathir Mohamed being elected the new Prime Minister, who then led an investigation into the corruption, resulting in a 12 year sentence for Najib. Two former employees of Goldman Sachs were charged, with one admitting that money from the fund was diverted to his personal bank account.

Roman Tiraspolsky/Shutterstock.com