The China Contract - How The World’s Biggest Financial Scandal Was Covered Up (Book launch)

By mid-2016, the record-breaking $5 billion theft from the Malaysian sovereign fund 1MDB had been exposed and the prime minister of that country, the suave, British-educated Najib Razak, was on the ropes. He denied that the money was missing; however, the fund had borrowed billions and was defaulting on its massive debts thanks to the gaping hole in its accounts. To cover his tracks and repay those debts Najib needed a huge amount of cash, and fast: he turned to his superpower neighbour, China.

What then unfolded has been pieced together by Clare Rewcastle Brown, the reporter who exposed the original thefts from 1MDB. She got wind of the deal with China almost immediately, along with the extraordinary quid pro quo extracted by China to push forward a major strategic target of its Belt & Road initiative, namely, a concession to build and control an East-West rail line through Malaysia to link the South China Sea with the Indian Ocean.

In the same treaty, Najib executed a major pipeline deal as part of an economic and defence re-alignment towards China that was to enmesh Malaysia in a web of Chinese loans yet to be repaid. In her subsequent research, Rewcastle Brown pieced together and exposed how these projects were then used to perpetrate further thefts against the Malaysian people, whereby Najib endorsed a 100% inflation of the rail contract and ‘paid’ for the pipelines up-front as a ruse (they were never actually built) in order to cover 1MDB’s debts. Described as the ultimate Belt & Road case study, The China Contract details how the entire criminal project and subsequent money-laundering were facilitated through the highest echelons of the CCP, Chinese banks, Chinese construction companies, and top Chinese officials, acting as Najib’s co-conspirators in robbing his people of their money and independence.

Speaker & chair biographies

Clare Rewcastle Brown is a British investigative journalist and the founder of Sarawak Report and Radio Free Sarawak, independent platforms whose reporting has exposed corruption at the highest levels of Malaysian government. Her groundbreaking investigations into the 1MDB scandal helped to uncover one of the world’s largest financial corruption schemes and contributed to the downfall of Malaysia’s government in 2018.

Prof. John Sidel is Director of the Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre, and the Sir Patrick Gillam Professor of International and Comparative Politics at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE).

*Banner photo by Khairil Yusof, CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

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