The Wolf of Malaysia: Money, Britney Spears & Massive Financial Fraud in "Man on the Run"

Want to know how the rich and entitled do business? Forget Bling Empire. Look at "Man on the Run."

For his birthday, Jho Low paid Britney Spears $1 million to pop out of a cake. Najib Razak, son of Malaysia's 2nd Prime Minister Tun Razak, purportedly refers to his family as “The Kennedys of Malaysia.”

These are some of the juicy tidbits in Netflix's documentary on 1MDB, “Man on the Run.”

It is way more entertaining than anything in Bling Empire, in terms of uncovering the crazy, society-destroying acts that the rich and entitled get up to.

You know it promises to be good when Najib Razak threatens to sue Netflix shortly after the documentary dropped.

The brazen scale of the massive financial fraud is jaw-dropping. An estimated US$3.5 billion was stolen from the Malaysian people, making 1MDB the biggest financial fraud in history. These brazen, rich people were super confident they would never get caught.

To think the crime would not even have been discovered, without one whistle-blower and his conscience, Xavier Andre Justo.

He was the third-in-charge at PetroSaudi, a joint venture between 1MDB and some private Saudi businessman.

1MDB was supposed to fund PetroSaudi with $1 billion, but only $300 million was channeled. The remaining $700 million was allegedly funneled to Jho Low's private holding company, according to emails shown by Mr Justo.

For his whistle-blowing, Mr Justo was thrown into jail for 3 years in Thailand, which accused him of blackmailing his former employer. When he was released, Switzerland, his home country, tried to investigate him for industrial espionage, which is another term for whistle-blowing. He was forced to flee Switzerland, with his wife and young son. He was also declared bankrupt.

At one point, even Anwar Ibrahim appears in the documentary to say that he was imprisoned on trumped-up charges after asking where the 1MDB funds were going.

“As newsmen and journalists, you can sometimes tell or smell when something is off.”

- Ho Kay Tat

The Edge's owner, Ho Kay Tat, was hounded and attacked in Malaysia, because his independent financial magazine was very, very persistent in asking questions about 1MDB. The Edge was instrumental in breaking the discovery of Jho Law's financial crimes.

Once the arrest warrant for Najib Razak was issued, the night of the long knives broke loose.

Malaysian police broke into the Attorney General's Office and confiscated investigative documents. The anti-corruption commission was disbanded. The Edge was closed down. Najib retired then AGC Abdul Gani Patail, and the young lawyer who drafted the warrant disappeared in a car accident on his way to work. DPP Kevin Morais was murdered, his body later found in an oil drum. This is according to the Netflix documentary.

Are there victims in financial crimes like 1MDB?

Contrary to popular perception, there are victims in financial crimes, in a way not easily understood.

Malaysia is still on hook for $11 billion worth of debt, issued by 1MDB. The proceeds are mostly lost — through payments to Goldman Sachs (the investment bank that helped MDB arrange the debt sales), to payoffs to counterparts in Saudi and UAE, to the main players in the scandal, one of whom, Jho Law, is still at large.

This means that Malaysia still has to pay back $11 billion in the near future.

This means that its budget to finance hospitals, schools, roads, infrastructure, economic development will have to be cut to finance those debt repayments.

Do ordinary Malaysians know the 1MDB scandal?

It may be the biggest financial fraud in the world in history, but ordinary Malaysians interviewed on the street do not seem to really know what the 1MDB scandal is about.

As Ho Kay Tat seems to suggest, mainstream media in Malaysia is still quite docile.

Again, this speaks to the difficulty in uncovering financial crime, and also how even financial instruments like bonds and stocks is sometimes difficult for the man on the street to understand.

In this case, if not for a handful of dogged Malaysian journalists and one London-based whistle-blower, the unquestioning nature of the Southeast Asian majority would make it difficult to uncover and prosecute crimes by the rich and powerful.

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