KUALA LUMPUR – An office building in the City of London linked to the family of former finance minister Tun Daim Zainuddin has been pulled from the market, Bloomberg reported.
Quoting sources, it said that the building at 1 Crown Court on Cheapside, approximately 400m from St Paul’s Cathedral, was put up for sale last year for £28.6 million (approximately RM171 million).
Based on documents seen by the news agency, an outline deal was agreed with an investor earlier this year, but discussions collapsed and the property has since been withdrawn from sale, according to sources who asked not to be identified as the process was private.
UK Land Registry filings show the building is owned by a British Virgin Islands-registered company called Straits Properties Ltd.
That company is ultimately owned by a trust of which Daim’s wife is a beneficiary, according to a report by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) from January.
A representative of the family declined to comment.
The Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission (MACC) seized a skyscraper owned by Daim’s family in Kuala Lumpur in December, prompting Daim to say it was a “political witch hunt.”
Daim, who served as finance minister for two terms, was one of Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad’s closest confidantes during Malaysia’s longest-serving prime minister’s almost 24 years in office.
Dr Mahathir was the mentor of current Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim before he famously sacked him from government in 1998.
Anwar was later sent to prison on charges of corruption and sodomy.
MACC responded to Daim’s comments by saying it opened an investigation into him in February 2023 based on information revealed in the Pandora Papers.
The papers were a trove of 11.9 million leaked documents on offshore entities published by the ICIJ in 2021.
In January, Daim and his wife Toh Puan Na’imah Abdul Khalid were charged with allegedly failing to declare assets under Malaysia’s anti-corruption law. They have pleaded not guilty.
Straits Properties bought the office building in 2014 for £31.5 million (RM189 million), land registry filings show.
Daim served as Malaysia’s minister of finance from 1984 to 1991, prior to which he had a career in several industries spanning banking, real estate development, and law.
London real estate has long been a magnet for the global wealthy looking for a place to park their cash.
The UK has sought to clean up its reputation as a safety deposit box for investors with few real checks on their sources of wealth by introducing measures such as a register of overseas owners of UK property.
However, the framework has various loopholes and has yet to lead to a meaningful increase in enforcement actions. – May 25, 2024