Some $7bn was stolen in the 1MDB scandal. It cost $8bn to cover it up.
Clare Rewcastle Brown uncovered it from a spare room in her house, with a blog and a shortwave radio, no newsroom, no budget, no legal team.
When a $15m PR firm was hired to destroy her reputation, she investigated the PR firm and had it shut down. When London’s top libel firms sent legal letters, she didn’t reply to them.
Rewcastle Brown grew up in Borneo, watched the rainforest she remembered as a child get replaced by oil palm plantation and decided to start writing about it.
What she found was not just local corruption but a web that ran through Goldman Sachs, the Wolf of Wall Street, a Kuwaiti emirate and the global financial system.
In this conversation she explains how a half million leaked emails cracked the 1MDB story, why corruption is almost always visible in plain sight, how London’s libel laws protect the corrupt rather than the journalism that exposes them, and what it means to be called a persistent pest by one of the men she put in jail.
Source: StoryCo / YouTube
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StoryCo is a podcast about the business of story and storytelling, hosted by James Kirkham.
The views expressed in Aliran's media statements and the NGO statements we have endorsed reflect Aliran's official stand. Views and opinions expressed in other pieces published here do not necessarily reflect Aliran's official position.
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