KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia: The Singapore High Court has granted winding up applications filed for three entities incorporated in the British Virgin Islands and linked to the multibillion-dollar scandal at Malaysian state fund 1MDB, liquidators recovering assets from the fund said on Friday (May 15).
The court decision will enable the liquidators to bring further statutory claims against Standard Chartered Bank and BSI Bank in Singapore over their roles in allegedly facilitating the 1MDB fraud, they said in a statement, as reported by Reuters.
Business Times also reported that the Singapore High Court has approved applications to wind up three British Virgin Islands-incorporated entities linked to the 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB) scandal, the firms’ liquidators confirmed on Friday.
In a statement, the liquidators, Angela Barkhouse and Toni Shukla from Kroll Limited, said the winding-up orders will pave the way for them to file statutory claims against Standard Chartered Bank Singapore and BSI Bank’s Singapore operations, as reported by Business Times.
“The Singapore court’s latest decision will allow the court-appointed liquidators to hold those who facilitated fraudulent acts against the companies fully to account,” they said.
“The statutory claim(s) will be pursued in addition to other ongoing claims brought against these banks, which include claims for dishonest assistance, breach of the banks’ duties of reasonable skill and care, and/or breach of their banking mandate, in respect of the companies now entering liquidation in Singapore.”
They added that the statutory claims will be filed “in short order”.
The four entities – Alsen Chance Holdings, Brightstone Jewellery, Brazen Sky and Blackstone Asia Real Estate Partners – were placed into liquidation in the British Virgin Islands between December 2021 and March 2024 for the purposes of investigating their alleged involvement in fraudulent transactions.
Their foreign liquidations were granted recognition under Singapore’s cross-border insolvency framework between 2022 and 2024.
The winding-up applications were filed in November 2025 as a workaround to an earlier ruling by the Singapore court, which had found that Singapore’s Model Law on cross-border insolvency barred foreign representatives from bringing avoidance claims relating to transactions that predated its introduction.
By obtaining local winding-up orders, the liquidators sought to pursue those pre-2020 transactions through Singapore-appointed liquidators instead.
Barkhouse and Shukla said that the overall objective is to “recover assets from the individuals and institutions our investigations have identified as having culpability for the misappropriation of assets from the companies”.
They added that such assets are “ultimately traceable to funds which were originally meant to benefit the people of Malaysia but were siphoned off”.
The ruling follows a separate High Court decision in March that rejected bids by Standard Chartered Bank Singapore and BSI Bank to intervene in the winding-up proceedings.
Justice Aidan Xu found that neither bank had standing to participate, dismissing their arguments that they qualified as contingent creditors of the British Virgin Islands entities based on the possibility of future costs orders being made against the firms.
In response to queries, a Standard Chartered spokesperson said: “More than 13 years ago, these shell companies deceived the bank and abused its services by using their accounts to launder money misappropriated from 1MDB.”
The spokesperson added that Standard Chartered will “vigorously defend against their attempts to now obtain from the bank the money they paid away”.
“Our position on these unmeritorious claims remains unchanged as set out in our (previous) statement on our website.”
QUICK NOTES (as reported by Reuters)
* The claims would be pursued in addition to other ongoing legal actions brought against the banks, including those related to allegations of "dishonest assistance, breach of the banks' duties of reasonable skill and care, and/or breach of their banking mandate," the liquidators said.
* The liquidators have said they were exploring workarounds after Singapore's appeals court in March dismissed their bid to sue the banks for alleged fraud, upholding a lower court ruling.
* Singapore's High Court had dismissed the suit against Standard Chartered and BSI in October last year, ruling that the city state's cross-border insolvency framework could not be applied to the case as the alleged transactions occurred before the law took effect in 2018.
* US and Malaysian investigators say about $4.5 billion was stolen from 1MDB between 2009 and 2014 in a complex scheme that has implicated a former prime minister, as well as high-level officials and top financial institutions around the world.
