Anger at Influence mongering, insider deals and what looks like the emergence of a kleptocracy have gone to the top of the agenda. And this happened because from day one, when Trump abolished the Department of Justice’s Kleptocracy Asset Recovery Unit that investigated Malaysia’s Najib Razak, amongst others, his administration has turned a blind eye to sleaze.
On that day he tore up any obligation on the part of the justice department to track down dirty foreign money. He then proceeded to nullify America’s Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA) and trashed its remit to investigate allegations of undisclosed lobbying and the bribery of officials.
And that was only the start. Fast forward to July’s celebrations to mark the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of American Independence – a commemoration that should have emphasised the enduring values handed down by the Founding Fathers of propriety honesty and integrity in government. Instead, to mark the anniversary, we now know that a scandalous ‘250 Pardons List’ was sitting ready for signing on Trump’s desk in the Oval Office.
We do not know who, if any, of the 250 criminals in pursuit of pardons whose names were on the list had paid huge sums to intermediaries, but the most notorious name of the 250 was the Malaysian fraudster, Jho Low, wanted by the FBI for his role in the biggest single recorded theft of money from the public – the $5 billion theft of Malaysian public money from its sovereign wealth fund 1MDB – in league with the then Prime Minister Najib who is now in prison in Malaysia.
I have been writing about Jho Low and these extraordinary thefts for several years. Currently hiding in China, he is reported by a reputable online news site to have offered a staggering $2 billion.
Trump the Republican should have good reason not to offer a pardon to Jho Low who spent years courting the Democrats. On the instructions of the then Prime Minister Najib, Jho Low and his rap star friend Pras Michel had funnelled millions into Obama campaigns through a key fundraiser (and relative of the President) Frank White.
US investigations revealed that the Malaysians had also paid White millions of dollars for access and image burnishing on behalf of Najib, including a notorious game of golf with President Obama in Hawaii on Christmas Eve in 2014.
A half billion-dollar private equity fund had even been set up involving 1MDB’s partner in collusion, the Abu Dhabi fund Aabar, with White’s company put in charge of managing it.This fund was rapidly closed after being exposed.
And, following a civil forfeiture agreement, White had to pay back the $20 million he’d personally earned from the relationship.
The exposure of the thefts from 1MDB put enormous pressure on Jho Low’s boss, the Malaysian prime minister Najib Razak. In mid-2016 the US Department of Justice published the money trails as part of $1.7 billion asset seizure, the biggest ever conducted by the Anti-Kleptocracy Unit.
In a new book The China Contract I detail how Najib attempted to deny the allegations and cover-up the gaping hole in 1MDB’s finances by engaged in a criminal enterprise together with the highest echelons of the Chinese Communist Party to steal more billions through mega-projects conducted through China’s signature Belt & Road initiative to bring transportation and infrastructure under its control through Asia and beyond.
Over a decade ago I began reporting on environmental vandalism and the human suffering caused the people of Malaysia by the capture of the state by commercial interests, which has demonstrated how corruption is globally connected in myriad ways. The consequences of criminal resource extraction go beyond the threats to our global biodiversity and climate and extend to dirty money finding its way to all the major centres of power.
The story has taken me from the Borneo state of Sarawak to Capitol Hill and from there to the Hall of the People in Beijing as I have unearthed a web of money-laundering by powerful institutions that links the plundering of resources from emerging economies to the major centres of world power.
In Malaysia they term it ‘money politics’ in this case it entailed the compromising of Malaysia’s independence. For, the then Prime Minister Najib fell under the controlling influence of its super-power neighbour, China, to which he had to turn to disguise his corruption through a bail out.
In his attempted cover-up, Najib went on to steal at least another $5 billion, by commissioning a series of ‘Belt & Road’ construction contracts at hugely inflated costs using money borrowed from China. Enormous backhanders were then passed from the complicit Chinese contractors through intermediaries in the Gulf with the intention of paying off, and thereby concealing, 1MDB’s theft-related debts.
Those corrupt arrangements were finally exposed to the public – angry insiders having leaked me the evidence.
Many assumed the issue of high-level corruption would go over the heads of an oppressed and supposedly unsophisticated electorate in Malaysia, caught up in partisan loyalties and focused on pocket-book issues. There has been a similar assumption in America that governance would not be a determinative factor at the ballot box.
That turned out not to be true: Malaysians understood that they’d been robbed and were outraged. Najib was vanquished in the 2018 election and his UMNO party, which had ruled Malaysia for the entire 70-year period since his country’s independence, was decimated in favour of a new party with a reforming platform.
We perhaps tend to assume that this sort of thing could never happen in the rule-bound corridors of power in the West and that our domestic leaders would never become compromised by hostile interests in such a way. However, as the then Deputy Head of the FBI, Andrew McCabe, explained in 2016 when America’s Department of Justice (DOJ) launched its multi-billion-dollar seizure of 1MDB stolen assets (which included the movie Wolf of Wall Street), dirty money is dangerous and things have deteriorated year after year since.
Tellingly, one former American Ambassador to KL confided that an education in money politics during their tenure in Malaysia had stood them in good stead for when they returned to DC during the first Trump administration. It would soon emerge that Najib was back paying even more to politically connected figures in an attempt to close down the 1MDB investigations in the midst of his China backed cover-up in 2017.
As the DOJ investigators would again flush out, the now fugitive Jho Low, working through Pras Michel, engaged on the basis of a $75 million success fee, another key fundraiser, this time the Republican Elliot Broidy, who was prepared to lobby White House officials to take the heat off Najib.
It didn’t stop there, because by then the Malaysians were in hock to the Chinese and Jho Low was being delegated to perform favours for China’s security services through Broidy as well. This included lobbying to extradite from the USA a known China critic and dissident named Miles Guo who’d taken refuge in America. This Republican fundraiser even travelled to China to meet his handlers. “We need to get that criminal out of the country!”, Trump is known to have expressed after receiving a briefing in the White House from Broidy’s network of key operators.
After he was caught in 2020, Broidy would plead guilty to the charge of undeclared lobbying under the Foreign Agents Registration (FARA) Act. Like White he paid back $6.6 million of the money he’d received but he potentially faced a substantial jail sentence. Trump pardoned Broidy, however, Pras Michel, was not so fortunate. Once regarded a champion of Black political engagement, he began a 14-year jail sentence last November having pocketed over $70 million from the funds sent over by Jho Low for political donations and influence mongering.
Whilst loudly condemning the alleged corruption of his opponents, my research on the Malaysian scandal shows that Trump is exhibiting some of the most recognisable traits of an archetypal kleptocrat from a ‘shit-hole country’, to use his own phrase. Allowing his son-in-law to preside over an even bigger, multi-billion-dollar investment fund, this time established by the Saudis just after leaving office, was a signature moment for Malaysians, surely, in that it mirrored on a massive scale the seduction of Frank White under the Democrats.
The connection has erupted into an even bigger scandal in just the past few days with further allegations that Kushner was an undeclared signatory to two further secret billion-dollar banks accounts funded by the Saudis and Abu Dhabi whilst still serving during Trump’s first presidency as a senior advisor.
What is needed now is an independent investigation into a growing list of similar conflicts and an explanation of how the Trump family have managed to become billionaires while he is in office and what contracts have been won through exploiting the President’s position.
Not only did Trump close down in week one of his new administration the Kleptocracy Asset Recovery Unit, which had exposed Najib, but his attorney general, the former Gulf lobbyist Pam Bondi, when in post, refocused investigative work under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) towards domestic issues and scaled back ‘aggressive prosecutions’.