I Exposed a $7 Billion Theft & Jailed a Prime Minister

Clare Rewcastle Brown on the 1MDB scandal, vexatious lawsuits, and why one blog brought down a government.

Some $7 billion was stolen in the 1MDB scandal. It cost $8 billion to cover it up. Clare Rewcastle Brown uncovered it from a spare room, with a blog and a shortwave radio and no newsroom behind her. When the Malaysian government hired a $15 million PR firm to destroy her reputation, she exposed the PR firm and had it shut down. When London's top libel firms sent legal letters, she didn't reply. The prime minister who orchestrated the theft is now in prison.

Rewcastle Brown grew up in Borneo, watched the rainforest she remembered become palm oil plantation, and started writing about it. What she found ran through Goldman Sachs, the Wolf of Wall Street, a Kuwaiti emirate, and the global financial system. In this conversation she explains how half a million leaked emails cracked the story, why corruption is almost always 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.

The libel system section is the best account of how the law has been weaponised against public interest journalism. And the moment she says she's not interested in the prime minister's prison sentence but in the consequences for the people of Borneo is the one that stays.