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The Man Behind the World's Biggest Financial Fraud | Investigators - YouTube
Channel: VICE News
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At one point, Jho Low
had more spending power
[2]
than just about anyone on Earth
[4]
because he had liquid cash
in his account that was stolen.
[7]
This fraud is unbelievable
[9]
because Jho Low just stole
billions of dollars almost overnight.
[13]
Investigators have called it one of
the biggest corruption cases ever.
[17]
The center of one of the worldâs
biggest cases of white-collar crime.
[21]
<i>Billions of dollars vanished from
the Malaysian state fund 1MDB,</i>
[25]
<i>only to be spent on
the political activities</i>
[27]
<i>of a sitting prime minister</i>
[29]
<i>and the lavish lifestyle of
the scamâs mysterious mastermind,</i>
[33]
<i>a Chinese businessman called Jho Low.</i>
[36]
He went on this kind of
global spending spree.
[37]
He would go and just drop millions of
dollars in nightclubs and bars.
[41]
<i>As a lot of you in this room know,</i>
[43]
I like to plan my evenings
[45]
and make sure that
I always go to the best parties.
[47]
Gambling and women.
[49]
He had a private plane that he
flew constantly around the world.
[52]
Luxury yachts
and homes in the Hamptons.
[55]
The quantum of money
that was stolen is so huge
[58]
it makes previous frauds
look almost pedestrian by comparison.
[63]
[INVESTIGATORS]
[67]
Iâm Bradley Hope,
and Iâm an investigative journalist
[70]
and the co-author of<i>
Billion Dollar Whale.</i>
[73]
Iâm Tom Wright,
co-author of <i>Billion Dollar Whale</i>.
[75]
So a few years ago, I was working for<i>
The Wall Street Journal</i> in 2015.
[80]
I came across a story about 1MDB,
[83]
which was an incredible
corruption scandal
[85]
that already was
out there in the media.
[88]
And we really dug in,
[90]
and we wrote a story,
a front page story,
[93]
about how Najib,
the then prime minister of Malaysia,
[96]
had used this fund as a slush fund
for his political ambitions.
[101]
I was relatively new
at <i>The Wall Street Journal,</i>
[103]
and they had assigned me to
a pretty intense financial beat.
[107]
And I was just reading
the newspaper
[109]
when I read Tomâs first story
about the 1MDB scandal.
[112]
And I noticed that there was a lot
of references to Abu Dhabi,
[116]
which is a place I used to live
and report from.
[118]
And so I got in touch
with Tom and said,
[120]
âMaybe I can help,
[121]
and I have some contacts
and things like that.â
[123]
Bradley and I
were able to piece together
[124]
the way the fraud worked
across different countries,
[127]
and that was really key
to the success of our endeavor.
[130]
This is the Jho Low story
in its potted version.
[133]
Jho Low grew up in Penang,
[135]
quite a small island
in northern Malaysia,
[138]
and he was from a sort of,
you know, well-to-do family.
[141]
So he went to
all these fancy schools,
[143]
like Harrow outside London
[145]
and Wharton,
[146]
and he was always kind of
seemingly among the rich kids,
[149]
but he wasnât truly rich
[151]
like some of these other
guys that were there.
[153]
And that was what made
this whole thing possible
[154]
is these close relationships
he forged.
[158]
The key to Jho Lowâs fraud
[159]
is that heâs able to network
better than almost anyone else,
[162]
any other fraudster in history.
[164]
The fact that there are
so many thinkers, connectors,
[167]
and social entrepreneurs
in one room truly motivates me.
[171]
When Jho Low was studying
in England at Harrow,
[174]
he became friendly with a guy called
Riza Aziz, who was Najibâs stepson.
[180]
He got in with the family
of Najib Razak,
[184]
who eventually became
the prime minister.
[185]
And then, on the other hand, is his
wife, whoâs called Rosmah Mansor,
[189]
and she was almost
your picture-perfect
[192]
wife of a kleptocratic
kind of figure.
[194]
She was addicted to spending,
[198]
had just enormous amounts
of jewelry in her house,
[201]
even before they reached
their peak of the 1MDB spending.
[205]
She couldn't wear a lot of
that stuff in public
[206]
because it was actually
too ostentatious.
[211]
Jho Low understood that
if he could get powerful people,
[215]
prime ministers
in different countries,
[216]
leaders of different countries,
to back what he was doing,
[219]
then he could become
extremely powerful.
[222]
At his peak, Jho Low really wanted to
have this image around himself
[226]
as this major businessman
who has this family kind of company,
[229]
family fortune behind a company,
[231]
and they created this video.
[232]
The company was called
Jynwel Capital.
[235]
Itâs just like a multimillion dollar
kind of promo video
[238]
that really just shows how
he could use all of his connections
[242]
to kind of bolster his image.
[244]
It is about how each deal
changes a community,
[248]
a country, and the world.
[250]
And he realized that there was
[251]
so much money sloshing around
in the world, especially state money,
[255]
which is managed by
sovereign wealth funds.
[257]
So he persuaded Prime Minister Najib
[259]
to set up a fund to ape what
they were doing in the Middle East,
[263]
and they called it 1MDB.
[265]
And Najib knew that
it was a slush fund,
[267]
that he was using it
to fund his political ambitions,
[269]
but he didnât know how much
money Jho Low was taking out,
[272]
and he gave Jho Low carte blanche
to do what he wanted with the fund.
[276]
At first, they borrowed from
local banks in Malaysia,
[279]
but they quickly hit a ceiling
[282]
for how much they could
borrow in that manner.
[283]
And they also needed the imprimatur
of a big, powerful Wall Street bank
[288]
to make them look legitimate.
[290]
And who better than Goldman Sachs,
[292]
which is obviously the most powerful
[294]
and well-known Wall Street
bank in the world, right?
[296]
So then they decided to graduate
to the next level of borrowing,
[300]
which was they
issued a bond, globally,
[303]
and Goldman Sachs
sold that bond to investors.
[305]
The way the scam worked was,
[307]
they would pretend to do deals
[308]
between 1MDB
and a fund in the Middle East.
[313]
And really, the money
would just get stolen.
[317]
So when he suddenly
had all this money,
[319]
that was stolen money from 1MDB,
[322]
he went on this kind of
global spending spree.
[324]
He had a private plane that he
flew constantly around the world.
[327]
Then they went on a multi-year
bacchanal of spending on
[331]
gambling and women
[333]
and luxury yachts
[334]
and homes in the Hamptons
and East and West Coast
[338]
and all of that kind of stuff.
[339]
He bought a big hotel
in Beverly Hills.
[341]
And then as soon as he kind of
got the bug of being in Los Angeles,
[345]
he wanted to become a filmmaker,
a film financier.
[347]
It happened that the son-in-law
of the Prime Minister of Malaysia
[351]
was also a big film buff.
[353]
They got to know that
Leonardo DiCaprio and Martin Scorsese
[356]
wanted to make a film about
the Wolf of Wall Street,
[359]
Jordan Belfort, the famous scammer.
[361]
But they couldnât get any studio
to give them the money
[364]
because it was a huge budget,
like $100 million.
[367]
Jho Low stole money to make<i>
The Wolf of Wall Street</i> film.
[371]
And for Jho Low, this was
a huge step into Hollywood,
[373]
and he became a major figure.
[376]
One of the best ways to kind of
sum up Jho Lowâs spending was
[379]
he would have these ideas like,
[381]
âIâm going to experience
New Yearâs twice.â
[383]
He went to Sydney on a 747
with a planeful of celebrities,
[386]
they experienced it,
and then they went back to Las Vegas,
[388]
and they did it all again.
[391]
So the story really broke in 2015.
[395]
That's when things really
started to come out.
[396]
Najib was ousted, and he even tried
to leave the country with his wife,
[399]
and they stopped him at the airport.
[401]
He claimed he was just going
to play golf in another country
[403]
to relax after he lost the election.
[405]
And they found all this
money in his house,
[406]
tens of millions of dollars of cash
just in his house
[410]
alongside endless amounts of jewelry,
handbags, sunglasses, tiaras.
[414]
And he was charged
with multiple crimes.
[418]
His wife was charged.
[419]
Many members of the family
and other people were charged.
[421]
Najib denied it.
[423]
He said that <i>The Wall Street Journal</i>,
where I used to work,
[425]
which broke this story, was,
you know, that we were liars,
[428]
that we were working for
the Malaysian opposition,
[431]
all these kinds of things
that he said about us.
[434]
He was convicted,
and now heâs appealing.
[436]
But in the meantime,
heâs actually still part of
[439]
the representative arm
of the government.
[448]
We donât know exactly
where Jho Low is right now,
[450]
but a couple of years ago,
after the book came out,
[454]
we know for sure he was in China.
[455]
We know he spent a lot of time
between Macao,
[458]
Hong Kong, and Shenzhen,
[460]
the kind of a little triangle.
[461]
And heâs spotted occasionally,
[463]
like a year and a half ago,
we heard he was at
[466]
a Victoriaâs Secret party
in Shanghai.
[469]
So heâs still hanging out in China.
[472]
Over a period of three years,
we traveled around the world.
[476]
We went to Shanghai,
Curacao, Thailand,
[480]
chasing every lead,
[481]
you know, reviewed thousands of
financial statements and documentsâ
[485]
many of them secretâ
[487]
investigative records in Malaysia,
[490]
which there was hundreds
of thousands of pages,
[492]
and interviewed whistleblowers
[493]
and every kind of
former employee of 1MDB.
[497]
One of the lessons from<i>
Billion Dollar Whale</i>
[499]
is that the checks and balances
[501]
that are supposed to be in place
to stop this kind of thing happening
[504]
just didnât work at all.
[506]
If youâre moving
huge amounts of money,
[508]
raising and moving
huge amounts of money,
[510]
it seems to me
in some cases itâs easier
[513]
because for the banks involved
thereâs a reason to push it through
[516]
because everyoneâs
going to make so much money.
[518]
[Low maintains his innocence
and has stated that he]
[521]
[âwill not submit
to any jurisdiction]
[523]
[where guilt has been
predetermined by politics]
[525]
[and where there
is no independent legal process,â]
[527]
[He contends that Malaysian
authorities are engaging in]
[529]
[a campaign of harassment
and political persecution]
[531]
[due to his prior support of
former Prime Minister Najib Razak.]
[532]
[Najib Razak was sentenced to
12 years in prison]
[534]
[and given a fine of $50m.]
[536]
[He is appealing
against the verdict.]
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