On Tuesday, 10 November, in the Kuala Lumpur High Court, Judge Aslam Zainuddin read out one sentence, and with it a four-day standoff between Malaysia’s palace, its attorney general and its prisons came to an end. “In accordance with the order of conditional pardon, the accused shall serve the remainder of the reduced sentence of six years’ imprisonment under house arrest,” the judge said, as Al Jazeera reported, drawing on AFP and Reuters.
The accused was Najib Razak, 73, prime minister until 2018, and now a prisoner because of 1Malaysia Development Berhad, the state fund known as 1MDB. The fund no longer exists. What happened to it ranks among the largest thefts of public money anywhere. An AFP photograph from the morning of the hearing shows him waving as he arrived at court.
A pardon with a price
It started in September. On the 18th, the king, Sultan Ibrahim, granted Najib a conditional pardon. He could serve out the rest of his term at home rather than in a cell, until 23 August 2028, provided he first paid his fine. That fine was RM50 million, which Al Jazeera put at $12 million. Malaysia’s kingship rotates among the country’s nine regional sultans. The office is mostly ceremonial, but the constitution leaves the power to pardon to the king’s discretion.
His party, UMNO, paid on Friday, 6 November. Najib was expected to walk out of prison. He did not.
Released, or confined
The trouble lay in the wording. The court’s discharge order of 6 November, issued once the fine was paid, said Najib was to be released. The Pardons Board had granted him house arrest, which is a different thing. Home Affairs Minister Saifuddin Nasution Ismail set out the discrepancy, and Attorney-General Mohd Dusuki Mokhtar stopped the transfer at the last minute on legal grounds. His chambers then asked the High Court to review the discharge order and issue a new one consistent with the king’s conditional pardon, Bernama reported.
The palace was not pleased. Sultan Ibrahim warned that any challenge to his order sending Najib from jail to house arrest could amount to defiance of his decree. Outside the court, Al Jazeera’s Rob McBride said the king had made his displeasure at the attorney general’s weekend intervention plain and had called it a very difficult precedent. “This has caused all manner of political and constitutional controversy in Malaysia,” McBride said.
So the judge corrected the paperwork. On Tuesday he set aside the 6 November discharge order, which had been tied to payment of the fine, and put the house-arrest order in its place.
A reflection, and only that: a state shows itself less in its large proclamations than in its forms. A king can pardon and a party can pay, and still a man stays behind bars because a clerk’s document says “released” where it should say “confined”. In Kuala Lumpur, getting a powerful man out of prison turned out to need the same rubber stamp everyone else waits for.
No. 11, Jalan Langgak Duta
Najib will serve the rest of the sentence at his home, No. 11 Jalan Langgak Duta, according to local reports. His lawyer, Muhammad Shafee Abdullah, said the move was expected later on Tuesday, and that the house is legally gazetted as a federal prison. Shafee also said Najib was relieved and thanked the king. He insisted the arrangement was no holiday: it was “still … imprisonment because he can’t leave the house unless he gets special permission or for a special reason.”
Seen from inside the residence, that may well be true. Seen from the cells, a gazetted villa is a very different place to be a prisoner.
This is not the first attempt to get Najib home. In December 2025, High Court judge Alice Loke Yee Ching rejected his bid to serve his sentence under house arrest, finding that an add-on order from the former king permitting it was invalid and unenforceable. The pardon now being carried out is the current king’s.
The second sentence
The house arrest covers only Najib’s first conviction, in the case concerning SRC International, a former 1MDB unit. Last year he was convicted in a second 1MDB-linked trial and sentenced to another 15 years in prison. He is appealing, and his lawyers have asked for the prison term and the fines to be suspended, citing his poor health and his inability to pay.
Reports differ on what Tuesday’s hearing settled about that second sentence. Al Jazeera wrote that it would begin once the house arrest ends, and Dimsum Daily reported that Najib must go back to prison then to serve it. The Edge reported that prosecutors asked the court to declare as much, but that Judge Aslam did not pronounce on it in court, which means the question will probably be decided nearer the time, while the defence tries to stay the sentence and overturn the conviction.
The date that matters is 23 August 2028. Until then Najib Razak lives at home, in a house that the Malaysian state has formally declared a prison, and the 1MDB money remains, as it has been for a decade, the measure by which his country’s courts, palace and government are judged.