Back in May, most Malaysians feared that they were fearing, that they were on the edge
of an abyss of tyranny and authoritarianism
of the kind that the wonderful singer we have just listened to was protesting so eloquently against.
Their rogue prime minister Najib Razak was in the midst of a massive corruption scandal.
He'd indebted his country heavily to neighboring China.
Few believed that they would be able to eject the authoritarian, entrenched regime that BN, his party
had established in Malaysia over six decades and dislodge that party
which had control over the electoral machinery.
But that's what happened.
On May the 9th, a tsunami of voters, brought in a new reforming, democratic government
into power in Malaysia; a welcome, new, progressive neighbor in the region for Taiwan.
How did that happen?
Well, perhaps we should ask the now-departed prime minister himself, Najib Razak
who a few days ago protested that there had been two reasons that he had been dislodged from power.
The first was that he had been undermined by untrue promises by the opposition.
The second was that he had lost the propaganda war
in an unfair playing field in the up-vent to the election.
And that's where I come in, because I was the reporter, the blogger, who was reporting on that corruption story
that he felt had caused him so much trouble.
And it certainly felt like an unfair playing field to me as well at that time.
He had the full propaganda of his state machinery, the wealth and power of a prime minister
and I was just trying to bring out, bit by bit, the truth of the story
of that 1MDB corruption scandal that I was covering.
On my side, I had the truth, and that's perhaps what made it so unfair for him.
I also had the most incredible story that I think had Malaysia spellbound for the
three years that I gradually was able, together with other media, to unveil the details of the 1MDB scandal.
This was a $4.5 billion theft from Malaysia's 1MDB development fund that turned out to be
the biggest global kleptocracy investigation by the United States and other world investigation agencies.
At the heart of it was a young man who had been working as Najib's advisor on the fund
and a payment of $681 million that I was able to prove had gone straight into Najib Razak's own account.
What else was I able to show the money was spent on?
That $250 million super yacht, for example
several business acquired by Jho Low, $100 million worth of diamonds
that were bought for the prime minister's wife
Beverley Hills mansions, New York pads, masterpieces in the world art market, fleets of expensive cars
and indeed, even the movie Wolf of Wall Street, a $100 million movie that was all about
a massive theft and the hedonistic spending of all that stolen money by a group of greedy young men.
It was actually representative in a small way
of the extraordinary and outrageous theft the 1MDB was itself about.
These people went off to Hollywood in Los Angeles with the A-listers of Tinseltown
and splurged that cash that had been raised in the name of helping the poor of Malaysia.
And indeed, once the whole truth had come out and police raided the apartment
of the prime minister and his wife shortly after the election
$250 million of loose change, watches, and jewelry were picked up just lying around the flat itself
including 274 wildly expensive Hermes bags
which the prime minister's wife was particularly fond of carrying around.
I don't think anyone in Malaysia has much doubt
that it was the unveiling of that scandal in its full glory and Technicolored horror
that had convinced the whole country that it get rid of this government.
At the time, of course, the opposition leader, Anwar Ibrahim,
had been put in jail by Najib on trumped-up charges.
There was a disarrayed opposition, and yet they came together, and they got this government out.
So how had I begun to report on this and why?
I hadn't set out to challenge the government of Malaysia or to do a huge high-finance story.
I had come back to where I had been born and brought up
which was the Borneo jungle in East Malaysia
as a journalist who had worked in the west for many years
and had been shocked by a ground-level story, a human and environmental tragedy
which was the wholesale unnecessary destruction of the Borneo rainforest.
It was something that made no sense in terms of policy. It was totally unnecessary.
It had been done in the name of ordinary people, and yet those ordinary people had received none of the benefits.
They'd not been given compensation for the lands that had been stolen.
Most of them still didn't have running water or electricity.
Most of them were living, eking out a living
on the new palm oil plantations where they could find no food
trying to use the rivers, which were now clogged and polluted by fertilizer
in a landscape that is fast approaching a danger of desertification as a result
of this extraordinary, outrageous activity.
I set up a blog and decided that I would do my best
to bring this immense tragedy and outrage to ordinary Malaysians who were not getting the message
through their own state-controlled media.
I'd given up on, you know, global interest.
No one was really looking at this story, but I thought that through the internet
and through a local radio station that I started in the indigenous language
that was reaching the local people in the interior
I could then begin to make an impact on Malaysian public opinion.
And I started to target the two chief ministers of the rainforest states who had been cashing in that jungle.
Firstly, you can see diminutive Taib Mahmud on the left,
and then Musa Aman, who was Sabah's chief minister, on the right.
Taib Mahmud of Sarawak had accumulated a vast international portfolio of properties that he owned.
And I, through the internet, through open-source
and increasingly through a network of insiders who were contacting me
was able to start to present through my blog details of that vast empire of buildings and properties
that he had in America, Europe, Australia, and Canada; including the FBI building that he was the owner of
in North America, for example.
And that to me was, exemplified how this worked both ways
because these kleptocrats who siphon the money
out of the countries where they have too much political power and impunity
they can then bring that money and invest it in developed economies, which is what they want to do
and start to exercise a great deal of influence over those countries in which they invest.
And they become a threat in their own right.
I then went on to look at Musa Aman, next door
who had also been taking hundreds of millions of dollars in timber kickbacks.
And I was able to show again, thanks to leaks,
how that money had been siphoned through a series of offshore companies
aided by accounts for those companies in Hong Kong and Singapore owned in UBS bank
and previous to that HSBC bank.
And indeed, that particular case, is now being prosecuted in Switzerland where their
major bank is facing charges of money laundering by assisting that transfer of timber kickbacks.
And you know, it to me summarizes, what I was starting to learn as I started to unpick these scandals.
And what I was starting to learn was that this is not just a question of local corrupt rulers.
It is the facilitators from the global financial community, the western professional classes
who will come in in the guise of bankers, accountants, wealth managers, offshore incorporators
media specialists, and investors, and businessmen
to help these local people all over the world get their money out from the scene of the crime
funnel it through the offshore system and into the developed economies
where they want to make yet more money and influence people.
And this is why I soon began to realize that this wasn't just a local tragedy.
It's a global problem.
And what was happening in Sarawak and in Malaysia
was just emblematic of what's going on all over the planet
thanks to the way that we have allowed our,
particularly our offshore system to develop
in this secretive fashion that enables huge amounts of our global wealth
to be redistributed without anyone knowing what's going on
or being able to hold these local kleptocrats to account.
So that was the work that I was doing.
Needless to say, neither Musa Aman nor Taib Mahmud were proceeded against
by their boss, the prime minister Najib Razak, because of course he was up to it, too.
Corruption starts at the top.
So how did I get my talons into the story of 1MDB
which was Najib's own particular slush fund?
It was how he was getting money out for himself to run his political campaigns
and to furnish the lifestyle to which he felt he should become accustomed.
Well, actually, I did it by seeing what was in plain sight, but just not being reported upon.
And that was the fact that this one Wolf of Wall Street movie
that was beginning to be the big blockbuster in Hollywood
at the start of 2014 was clearly closely connected to the prime players in 1MDB.
The producer of the movie was Rosmah Mansor
Najib Razak's son; the prime minister's own stepson.
And he and none other than Jho Low, that advisor who'd been so famously spending
so much money across the globe, was the financier of that movie.
And so I started to ask the questions and immediately got the reprisals
which was state-backed vilification against me.
My blog was blocked. I was vilified.
Fake news was manufactured for the tune of millions of dollars in order to attempt to discredit my story.
And I had to hold out against that.
Warrants for my arrest for abusing democracy and for supposedly passing false news in Malaysia were issued
and indeed, Najib even tried to get a red notice alert against me
in order to have me arrested by Interpol, luckily rejected.
My whistle-blowers and sources were moved against.
A Swiss national who'd given me a great deal of data on 1MDB
was picked up and captured in Thailand, forced into making false confessions against
he was forced to say that I had forged all the documents.
And he was thrown into a Thai jail, where he remained for 18 months.
Another young prosecutor in Malaysia who had issued a warrant actually drawn up
by the attorney general at that time against the prime minister
because there had been investigations into this crime
he was pulled out of his car in moving traffic on the streets of KL
and murdered and found encased in a concrete drum a few days after I had published that document
that he had made showing that there were attempts to hold the prime minister to account.
The turning point came, actually, thanks to the Department of Justice of the United States,
who had taken up this issue precisely because economies and governments
like the United States have belatedly come to realize the danger to our own democracies
of allowing this global kleptocracy and the transfer of criminal money into our societies.
And they had started up a kleptocracy investigation unit
which seized $2 billion worth of assets that had been taken from 1MDB and then invested in America.
And it was that vindication, really, of the story
that I had been working on for so long, had been refuted by Najib, that really turned the tide in this.
It didn't mean that Najib didn't lash back.
In fact, just as we were coming up to that May election, he cracked down majorly.
He arrested a number of people, issued new laws that enabled him to arbitrarily pick up critics.
He passed one of the fake news laws; the first fake news laws globally.
And then really by the time that the Malaysians reached the election, they were terrorized by what could happen.
But what did happen was that this whole awareness through the media and through the action
of the Department of Justice and other regulators
had wised up the people in Malaysia, who had got round what was being told to them
by their own government and the propaganda machine.
And the old strongman veteran leader of Malaysia,
Mahathir Mohammed, joined up with the reforming movement
to create a front against the government that was threatening the liberties of the country.
He pledged to the reform movement, pledged to release Anwar Ibrahim
and to make Anwar Ibrahim the new leader.
And as a result, there was a tsunami on May the 9th, and that government was overthrown.
As a last point, I would like to leave with you
the obvious importance of the media, a free media, in bringing that information to the people of Malaysia
so that they could make a properly informed decision about who should be their government.
And on the more international scale, it's not just regime change that this scandal has achieved.
What we've seen is numerous banks being drawn into this for their complicity, not just turning a blind eye
but in the case of Goldman Sachs, which just a few days ago received two major indictments
against it in the United States, by the Department of Justice, we see that there were at least two people
within Goldman Sachs who were complicit, knowingly taking money for helping
in the funneling of the billions that were stolen and knowingly paying bribes.
And what the DOJ indictment says that many more people in the bank were aware of this,
that there was a culture in the bank that was enabling kleptocracy in Malaysia.
And one wonders how many other banks are going to be held accountable for this and other such scandals.
What we need is to cherish our free media, promote our free media,
and we need an end to this offshore secrecy that is allowing this global kleptocracy to continue.
Thank you.