It seemed a facetious question, one intended to provoke the star witness: “Do you think you are good at lying?” But it is the crucial issue at the center of what is likely to be the only trial on U.S. soil in one of the largest international kleptocracy cases in history, the looting of billions of dollars from the people of Malaysia. A former banker at Goldman Sachs, Roger Ng, is accused of taking part in a bribery and kickback scheme that enabled the fraud, which plundered more than $4 billion from a Malaysian sovereign wealth fund and bought a king’s ransom of jewelry, art and real estate from Manhattan to London to Beverly Hills, the New York Times reported. Ng’s former boss at Goldman, Tim Leissner, was for years one of Goldman’s most powerful deal makers in Asia. Now, he’s the government’s key witness — and an admittedly prolific fabricator. On the stand in a Brooklyn federal courtroom, he acknowledged misleading co-workers, investigators and all three of his wives. But when Mr. Ng’s lawyer prodded him with the question about whether he’s a good liar, Mr. Leissner coolly replied, “I don’t think so.” Mr. Leissner’s 10 days of testimony — including six days of blistering cross-examination — laid out the details of a global fraud that toppled Malaysia’s prime minister and forced Goldman Sachs, one of the world’s most prestigious financial institutions, to go before a U.S. judge and admit, for the first time in its 153-year-history, that it was guilty of a crime. The question for jurors: How much of what Mr. Leissner said was true? Mr. Leissner acknowledged to the court that he has “lied a lot,” including by presenting a bogus divorce decree to his now-estranged wife, the model and fashion designer Kimora Lee Simmons, so that she would marry him eight years ago. But he insists he’s telling the truth about Mr. Ng, who prosecutors say helped line the pockets of officials in Abu Dhabi and powerful Malaysians close to then Prime Minister Najib Razak.
