Back in 2022 Sarawak Report published the list of questions it wished to put to one Robin Rathmell a UK and US qualified lawyer who has represented Jho Low and his family’s myriad suits since we exposed the fraudster in 2015.

At the time, Rathmell had just returned from failed negotiations in KL with the Ismail Sabri government to buy Jho’s freedom for RM1.5 billion, mediated by Najib’s former tame AG Apandi Ali. The story leaked and the plans collapsed, however it has been noted ever since that the Red Notice published  by Malaysia for the arrest and extradition of the fraudster to the scene of his crimes in Malaysia has disappeared from the INTERPOL website.

Despite calls for that public warrant to be clearly re-instated (including by Najib’s own lawyer Shafee Abdullah) no steps have been taken to do so, implying that the negotiations around Jho Low’s freedom for favours proposals, referred to in our previous article, remain ongoing.

Mr Rathmell declined to answer our questions about his representation of Jho Low, but there is every reason to believe he still does so and that he is behind the parallel legal attempts to buy a similar pardon deal in the United States also revealed last week. Presumably this entails working  not only through the official request published in the US but also through blandishing those around the Trump administration and private network, which is something readers of Sarawak Report will know Jho Low already has a long track-record in doing.

It is our information that such forms of blandishment also explain Jho’s continuing survival in China where he plainly represents a major flight risk given his constant attempts at negotiating an escape. Should he succeed, the fugitive holds the potential to cause China massive embarrassment pertaining to his inside knowledge of the corruption of the country’s signature Belt & Road initiative in order to subjugate target recipients, such as Malaysia under Najib.

Subsequent to the 2022 attempt (which followed an earlier approach spurned by the Mahathir government in 2018) there has clearly been a complex and prolonged campaign to balance the incentive of alleged hundreds of millions still locked off-shore and apparently available only to a liberated Jho Low with obtaining free global passage for the fugitive.

In 2024 the US government settled a further civil asset seizure case with the Low family, confiscating over a hundred million dollars of properties, artwork and frozen accounts which had been identified over and above the earlier asset seizures against the fraudster. However, at the time the US government made clear it had not settled the outstanding criminal charges against Jho Low as part of such a process.

Indeed, he is wanted in the United States not only for money laundering through those assets but also for assisting spies on behalf of China and subverting federal workers and lobbyists and pals of Donald Trump and Barak Obama to achieve various ends using his stolen cash.

Nonetheless, Jho has clearly persisted in his attempts and acting as his legal representative is clearly lucrative work (Sarawak Report is aware of the principle that every fugitive oligarch deserves legal representation to defend themselves, using money they have stolen, as well as to bully journalists who expose their antics).

We noted that Robin Rathmell left the original law firm Kobre & Kim which originally represented Jho Low in the July following the May 2022 attempted negotiations in KL.  He took his toxic client to Kasowitz, Benson & Torres, according to Foreign Agent Registration (FARA) filings, and then in 2025 set himself up as a founding partner in a new ’boutique law firm’ named Rathmell Short LLP which advertises itself somewhat tellingly as:

“a single focus firm that specializes in represent[ing] high-net worth individuals, their families, and their businesses in distressed circumstances around the world. Our core areas of expertise are sanctions remediation, white collar criminal defense, asset forfeiture defense, asset protection, and serious civil fraud litigation. We negotiate with the United States and other governments on behalf of our clients.”

Rathemell Short’s FARA filings indicate two such clients so far, one a Putin connected ex-KGB Russian oligarch being pursued by the US government and a mysterious Chinese company XH Smart Tech China Co. Ltd which is itself facing sanctions by the U.S. Treasury for supplying electronic components to Russia’s military.

Today, the ex-WSJ Jho Low watchers from the Brazen Project provided further information on that China based concern, strengthening obvious suspicions that the company is connected to Jho Low.

According to this latest research the law firm has been paid for this representation (a handsome $5.5 million fee) not by the company itself but by a third party, much in the same way that Jho Low paid Rathmell’s previous law firm Kobre & Kim through the now jailed Sheikh Sabah from Kuwait, as exposed by Sarawak Report.  The Sheikh acted as a front for money laundered from bogus Malaysian infrastructure contracts with China paying off Jho’s legal and other bills.

According to Project Brazen’s review of the FARA filings, the third party funder is a Hong Kong company called Intemath Trading Limited, which is owned by a 24 year old woman based inn Zhuhai, which they claim is “the exact same city where the sanctioned tech company is based, and where Jho Low is believed to operate”.

Several journalists have now approached Mr Rathmell for comment as did Sarawak Report back in 2022.  Let’s see if they are more fortunate than we were in receiving a reply. Likewise, let’s see if the US President agrees to issue such a pardon to Jho Low, which has been strangely termed as a request for pardon ‘after completion of sentence’. The only sentence Jho Low is known to have served is that of a gilded exile in China.