Singapore Says None of Its Banks Got $3 Billion of 1MDB Funds

Singapore said none of the banks in the city state had received $3 billion from Goldman Sachs Group Inc. related to a bond sale by 1Malaysia Development Bhd.

The comment was made “in response to media queries,” the Monetary Authority of Singapore said in a one-line statement Wednesday. It didn’t name any media organizations.

The statement came after the Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday that Goldman Sachs had wired $3 billion of proceeds from a bond issue it arranged for 1MDB in 2013 to an account controlled by the fund at the Singapore branch of a small Swiss private bank.

U.S. investigators are trying to determine if Goldman had broken the law when it didn’t flag what appeared to be a suspicious transaction in part because funds of that size would typically go to a large global bank, the paper said.

1MDB is at the center of global probes into allegations of money laundering and embezzlement. From Singapore to Switzerland to the U.S., investigators have been trying to trace whether money might have flowed out of the fund and illegally into personal accounts. 1MDB has consistently denied wrongdoing.

1MDB and Goldman both declined to comment on the Wall Street Journal report on Tuesday.

To contact the reporter on this story: Shamim Adam in Kuala Lumpur at sadam2@bloomberg.net. To contact the editors responsible for this story: Marcus Wright at mwright115@bloomberg.net, Darren Boey