Malaysia’s king granted former prime minister Najib Razak conditional clemency allowing him to serve the remainder of his corruption sentence under house arrest, AsiaOne reported on September 18. The decision followed a specially convened Pardons Board meeting chaired by Sultan Ibrahim Iskandar.
A statement from the Legal Affairs Department under the prime minister’s office said the arrangement would run until August 23, 2028, provided Najib paid the court-imposed 50 million ringgit fine. It also required him to comply with additional conditions that were not detailed in the statement. Failure to meet the conditions would result in forfeiture of the pardon.
Najib had been imprisoned since August 2022 after the country’s highest court upheld his conviction in a case involving SRC International, a former unit of the state investment fund 1MDB. The report described the house-arrest decision as an unprecedented use of royal clemency in Malaysia. It changed the conditions under which the remaining sentence could be served; it did not report an acquittal or the reversal of the underlying conviction.