The verdict of the Swiss Court had seemed inevitable to most of those who have followed the 1MDB scandal over the past years and had listened to the solid evidence of the prosecutors on the case.

The defence was not helped by the frankly outlandish arguments that had been brought first by Tarek Obaid, claiming he had been acting as some sort of secret emissary of the King of Saudi Arabia in assisting the Malaysian prime minister Najib Razak to steal from his own public funds, and then his co-accused, Patrick Mahony, who pleaded massive memory loss over the siphoning of a total of $1.83 billion from the joint venture entered into by their company PetroSaudi with 1MDB.

Thus when the judgement was read at the allocated time of 2pm this Wednesday afternoon it was a resounding guilty as charged.  Prosecutors had demanded the maximum ten sentence available for fraud.  The judge in the end pronounced a lesser but still hefty seven years for Tarek Obaid and six for Patrick Mahony.

Yet, somehow, it seems, Mahony had convinced himself that his ever resourceful antics would somehow  continue to defy justice.

Apparently, surprised, unlike everyone else, he appeared crestfallen in the dock.  Tarek meanwhile appeared detached from the proceedings, greedily consuming chocolate as the judge handed down his verdict.

Watching from inside the court was another former PetroSaudi colleague, Xavier Justo, who had played the whistleblower in this affair, passing vital documents to Sarawak Report back in 2015.

Justo had followed the trial in Bellinzona during the course of April and today he said that he could summon little sympathy for his former fellow directors, who had conspired as part of their early attempts at a cover-up to press false charges of blackmail, theft and forgery against him.

The pair, working with Najib’s own proxy Jho Low, had succeeded in committing Justo to jail for 18 months in Thailand as part of a much longer prison sentence brought against him.  That  incarceration was used to pretend to the public and to relevant finance institutions that the allegations of fraud concerning the 1MDB PetroSaudi ‘joint venture’ were lies.

Justo believes he narrowly escaped death as a result of those misadventures and was gratified that the Swiss prosecutors had confirmed during the trial that the PetroSaudi directors had deliberately misinformed banks and Thai officials, commissioning misleading reports that wrongfully claimed that Justo and Sarawak Report had altered data to incriminate them.

The data was in fact correct, prosecutors told the court, thereby exonerating the Swiss national who had paid such a heavy price for speaking out.  Speaking after the court hearing Xavier Justo told Sarawak Report:

“It’s the moment of our dreams. In the US they would have received sentences up to 50 years for what they have done but this is an exceptionally long sentence for Switzerland and it is very significant. I can’t say I feel happy, but I do feel the job is done now. We brought those criminals to justice Laura [his wife] and I”.

The judgement has added Obaid and Mahony to the handful of senior figures to receive custodial sentences over the world’s biggest kleptocracy case on record (others include Najib himself, Goldman Sachs banker Roger Ng, Khadem al Qubaisi and Mohammed al Hussainy from Abu Dhabi’s IPIC sovereign fund).

The moment it was handed down the defendants’ lawyers moved to beg for appeal.

The hearing was thus extended for several hours as arguments focused, of course, on whether the once jet setting pair should face custody pending that appeal: it seemed an exercise in putting off the date.

Free or not, it had already become clear life would not be as it was for the two convicted fraudsters. Their entire combined fortune, worth hundreds of millions of dollars and all stemming from the original thefts from 1MDB, was judged illegitimate and subject to seizure by the court.

Prosecutors had already itemised  in the indictment that Obaid had obtained at least $805 million and Mahony at least $37 million.

Confiscated assets included the luxury Gstaad chalet in which Mahony had housed his family and all the two men’s other properties in Switzerland and beyond.  Other jurisdictions have also been contending for the remaining global assets of PetroSaudi (in the region of £340 million) as a result of judgements in the United States and Malaysia.

However, the removal of his final trappings of wealth, along with the imposition of a shocking fine to essentially repay the stolen money with the interest accrued since 2009 – a sum that well exceeds  $2 billion  –  may well have created the sense of shock that finally reduced the seemingly imperturbable Mahony to the brink of tears as he at last absorbed the consequences of his decade of dishonesty at the expense of the Malaysian people.

As the day drew to a close the judge agreed the pair can continue to evade incarceration whilst the appeal process continues.  From her new home in Spain, Laura Justo commented that she is nonetheless confident that the outcome will remain the same and that both men will eventually face justice behind bars.

“After what they put me and my family through with Xavier in danger of his life and suffering in a Bangkok jail they deserve to end up there”

she told Sarawak Report.