Najib Razak

Biography

Najib Razak was born in 1953 in Kuala Lipis, Pahang, the eldest son of Abdul Razak Hussein, Malaysia's second prime minister. He was educated at St. John's Institution in Kuala Lumpur and Malvern College in England, and took a degree in industrial economics at the University of Nottingham in 1974, after which he worked briefly at the central bank and the state oil company Petronas.

When his father died in 1976, Najib, aged 23, was returned unopposed to his father's parliamentary seat of Pekan. He became the country's youngest deputy minister in 1978 and Menteri Besar of Pahang from 1982 to 1986, then held a series of cabinet posts under Mahathir Mohamad and his successors, including culture, youth and sports, defence, education and finance. He was an UMNO vice-president from 1993, deputy prime minister from 2004, and in April 2009 succeeded Abdullah Ahmad Badawi as UMNO president and prime minister.

His government cut subsidies, introduced a goods and services tax and, after the 2013 election, prosecuted critics for sedition, while opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim was jailed. From 2015 he was engulfed by the scandal over the state fund 1Malaysia Development Berhad, which provoked mass rallies and a campaign by Mahathir to oust him; he responded by dismissing his deputy and tightening control. In May 2018 his Barisan Nasional coalition lost power for the first time since independence.

Arrested in July 2018, Najib was convicted in 2020 of abuse of power, money laundering and criminal breach of trust over funds from SRC International, a 1MDB-linked company, becoming the first Malaysian prime minister convicted of corruption; he began serving his sentence in August 2022 after the Federal Court upheld it. In December 2025 the High Court convicted him on 25 further charges in the 1MDB-Tanore case.