at one point jolo had more spending
power than just about anyone on earth
because he had liquid cash in his
account that was stolen this fraud is
unbelievable because jolo just stole
billions of dollars almost overnight
investigators have called it one of the
biggest corruption cases ever the center
of one of the world's biggest cases of
white-collar crime billions of dollars
vanished from the malaysian state fund 1
mdb
only to be spent on the political
activities of a sitting prime minister
and the lavish lifestyle of the scam's
mysterious mastermind a chinese
businessman called joe low he went on
this kind of global spending spree he
would go and just drop millions of
dollars in nightclubs and bars as a lot
of you in this room know
i like to plan my evenings and make sure
that i always go to the best parties
gambling and women he had a private
plane that he flew constantly around the
world luxury yachts and homes in the
hamptons
the quantum of the money that was stolen
is so huge it makes previous frauds look
almost pedestrian by comparison
[Music]
i'm bradley hope and i'm an
investigative journalist and the
co-author of billion dollar whale
i'm tom wright co-author of billion
dollar whale so a few years ago i was
working for the wall street journal in
2015.
i came across this story about 1mdb
which was an incredible corruption
scandal that already was out there in
the media
and we really dug in and we wrote a
story a front-page story about how
najib the then prime minister of
malaysia had used this fund as a slush
fund for his political ambitions
i was relatively new at the wall street
journal and i was they had assigned me
to a pretty intense financial beat and i
was just reading the newspaper when i
read tom's first story about the 1mdb
scandal and i noticed that there was a
lot of references to abu dhabi
which is a place i used to live and
report from and so i got in touch with
tom and said maybe i can help and i have
some contacts and things like that
bradley and i were able to piece
together the way the fraud worked across
different countries and that was really
key to the success of our endeavor
this is the jolo story in its potted
version
jolo grew up in penang quite a small
island in northern malaysia
and he was from a sort of
you know well well-to-do family so he
went to all these fancy schools like
harrow outside london and wharton and he
was always kind of seemingly among the
rich kids but he didn't he wasn't truly
rich like some of these other guys that
were there and that was what made this
whole thing possible is the sort of
these close relationships he forged the
key to jolo's fraud is that he's able to
network better than almost anyone else
any other fraudster in history the fact
that there's so many thinkers connectors
and social entrepreneurs in one room
truly motivates me when jolo was
studying in england at harrow
he became friendly with
a guy called riza aziz who was najib's
stepson he
he got in with the the family of najib
razak who eventually became the prime
minister and then on the other hand is
his wife is called rasma mensor and she
was almost your picture perfect wife of
a kleptocrat kind of figure she was
addicted to spending
had had just enormous amounts of jewelry
in her house even before
they reached their peak of the 1mdb
spending she couldn't wear a lot of that
stuff in public because it was actually
too ostentatious
jolo understood that if he could get
powerful people prime ministers in
different countries leaders of different
countries to back what he was doing then
he would he could become extremely
powerful at his peak jolo really wanted
to kind of
have this image around himself as this
major businessman who has this family
kind of company family fortune behind a
company and they created this video
for the company was called general
capital it's just like a multi-million
dollar kind of promo video that is is
really just shows how he could use all
of his connections to to kind of bolster
his image
it is about how each deal changes a
community a country
and a world and he realized that that
there was so much money sloshing around
in the world especially state money
which you know is managed by sovereign
wealth funds so he persuaded prime
minister nadjib to set up a fund to ape
what they were doing in the middle east
and they called it one mdb
and nancy knew that it was a slush fund
that he was using it to fund his
political ambitions but he didn't know
how much money jola was taking out and
he gave jolo carte blanche to do what he
wanted with the fund
at first they borrowed from local banks
in malaysia but they quickly kind of hit
a ceiling for how much they could borrow
in that manner and they also needed the
imprimatur of a big powerful wall street
bank to make them look legitimate and
who better than goldman sachs which is
obviously the most powerful and
well-known wall street bank in the world
right so then they decided to kind of
graduate to the next level of borrowing
which was they issued a bond globally
and and goldman sachs sold that bond to
investors the way the scam worked was
they would pretend to do deals between
one mdb and a fund in in the middle east
and really the money would just get
stolen
so when he suddenly had all this money
that was a stolen money from one mdb he
went on this kind of global spending
spree he had a private plane that he
flew constantly around the world
then they went on a multi-year
bacca now of spending on you know
gambling and women and luxury yachts and
homes in the hamptons and east and west
coast and all that kind of stuff
he bought a big hotel in beverly hills
and then as soon as he kind of got the
bug of being in los angeles he wanted to
become a filmmaker a film financier it
happened that the
son-in-law of the prime minister of
malaysia was also a big film buff they
got to know that leonardo dicaprio and
martin scorsese wanted to make a film
about the wolf of wall street jordan
belfort the famous scammer and but they
couldn't get any studio to give them the
money because it was a huge budget like
100 million dollars jolo stole money to
make the wolf of wall street film
and for jolo this was a huge step into
hollywood and he became a major figure
one of the best ways to kind of sum up
joe though spending was he would have
these ideas like i'm going to experience
nearest twice he went to sydney on a 747
with a plane full of celebrities they
experienced it and then they went back
to las vegas and they did it all again
so the story
really broke in 2015 that's when things
really started to come out najib was
ousted and he even tried to leave the
country with his wife and they stopped
him at the airport he claimed he was
just going to play golf in another
country to relax after he lost the
election they found all this money in
his house tens of millions of dollars of
cash just like in his house alongside
endless amounts of jewelry handbags
sunglasses tiaras and he was charged
with multiple crimes his wife was
charged many members of the family and
other people were charged najib denied
it
he said that the wall street journal
where i used to work which broke this
story was you know that we were liars
that we were we were working for the
malaysian opposition all these kinds of
things that they said about us
he was convicted and now he's appealing
but in the in the meantime he's actually
still part of the representative arm of
the government
[Music]
we don't know exactly where jolo is
right now but but a couple of years ago
after the book came out we know for sure
he was in china we know he spent a lot
of time between macau hong kong and
shenzhen the kind of a little triangle
and and he spotted occasionally like a
year and a half ago we heard he was at a
like a victoria secret party in shanghai
so he he's still hanging out in china
over a period of of three years we we
traveled around the world from places
like we went to shanghai curacao
thailand
chasing every lead you know reviewed
thousands of of financial statements and
documents many of them secret
investigative records in malaysia
which there was hundreds of thousands of
pages
and interviewed whistleblowers and every
kind of former employee of 1mdb
one of the lessons from billion dollar
whale is that the the checks and
balances that are supposed to be in
place to stop this kind of thing
happening just didn't work at all if
you're moving
huge amounts of money raising and moving
huge amounts of money it seems to me in
some cases it's it's easier because for
the banks involved there's a reason to
push it through because everyone's going
to make so much money
[Music]
you