In August 2022, Najib Razak lost his final appeal and entered Kajang Prison carrying a twelve-year sentence, for taking RM42 million out of a former unit of 1MDB, the sovereign wealth fund whose looting had been under investigation since July 2015. bbc.com Malaysia had done what almost no country manages—jailed a former prime minister.
What happened over the next four years is where this case gets interesting.
Eighteen months into the sentence, the Pardons Board halved it. The twelve years became six, the RM210 million fine became RM50 million, and a release date appeared: 23 August 2028, provided the reduced fine gets paid. malaymail.com aljazeera.com The board publishes no reasoning. A sentence a court took years to impose was reduced by half in a meeting whose deliberations nobody outside it has read.
Then he fought to serve the rest at home. A royal addendum, he argued, permitted house arrest instead of Kajang Prison. In December 2025 the High Court rejected that: the addendum had never been discussed at the Pardons Board meeting and failed the constitutional test. malaymail.com Razak appealed, then withdrew the appeal in April 2026. thediplomat.com
Four days after the house-arrest ruling came the bigger conviction. On 26 December 2025, after a trial that had run seven years, the High Court convicted him on all 25 charges—four of abuse of power and 21 of money laundering—over RM2.3 billion of 1MDB money that passed through his accounts. Fifteen years in prison, to run concurrently, and a fine of RM11.38 billion. cnn.com scmp.com
The conviction isn’t final. Razak filed his appeal four days later, contesting both the verdict and the sentence. malaymail.com In May 2026 his lawyers went further, asking the Court of Appeal to accept fresh evidence about the fugitive financier Jho Low and the former 1MDB legal counsel Jasmine Loo. malaymail.com Everything about this conviction is still being fought, and nothing here predicts how it ends.
If we look at these numbers side by side, the disparity is glaring. The fine attached to the 1MDB conviction, RM11.38 billion, is roughly two hundred and twenty-eight times the reduced fine he must pay to walk out in 2028. The prison terms, by contrast, are measured in years and run concurrently. When a penalty is overwhelmingly financial and the custodial part gets halved by a board that explains nothing, a question becomes unavoidable: which number is actually the punishment?
Malaysia did what almost no country does, and then spent four years deciding how much of it to keep.
Comment
The Questions That Remain
This is not a case of a system failing to act. It acted repeatedly, and it is still acting. A court convicted a former prime minister and jailed him; a board cut that sentence in half; a court refused to let him serve the rest at home; another court convicted him again on a far larger sum. Every one of those moves is the system working as designed, which is exactly why the design matters to look at.
Two things stand out. The first is the complete lack of explanation. A pardons board can halve a sentence that took a court years to impose, and publish nothing about why. Clemency is a real power and an old one, but when it’s exercised without any stated reason, you can’t argue with it. A country that has just jailed its former leader has an unusually strong interest in being able to argue with it.
The second is proportion. When the fine exceeds the custodial penalty by several orders of magnitude, the sentence stops describing a punishment and starts describing a debt, and debts can be negotiated in ways that years in Kajang cannot.
What Happens Next
His appeal against the 1MDB conviction is still ongoing, the fresh-evidence application is before the Court of Appeal, and the release date attached to the first sentence is 23 August 2028. Those are the knowable dates right now, and we’ll track them rather than guess how they’ll end.
Malaysian newsrooms have covered this case for a decade, through several governments. We follow their reporting to keep it from disappearing. The advantage of cases like this is that they don’t resolve quickly—which means there’s actually time to watch what happens.