Billion Dollar Whale, Wright & Hope, 2018 – This could be the script of a hollywood thriller, as it has political intrigue, international financial fraud involving swiss and wall street banks (Goldman), sovereign wealth funds from 1MDB, Mubadala and ADIA, hollywood glitz and glamour from high profile figures like Leonardo DiCaprio and Scorsese being involved (Wolf of Wall St. was financed by funds siphoned from 1MDB) and of course the mastermind behind it all who most of us haven’t even heard of in Jho Low.
1MDB scandal was a fraud of serious proportions involving $12 billion which was siphoned off from the sovereign fund of Malaysia, explicitly setup for this purpose by Jho Low in which the then president Najib Nazak (now cooling his heels in prison) and family were closely involved. It is amazing how much you can fake it and make it in high-profile finance so some of these deals these so called VCs and wall st. banks are making isn’t surprising. It is perhaps easier to con people not dealing with their own money.
The book details the modus operandi and the people involved in very good detail. If at all you have ever wondered how funds are moved offshore to tax havens and routed back, or how networking works in high-society, or in general how political funding works in developing countries where sovereign funds siphoned are re-routed back to finance election campaigns as was done here to get Najib Razak re-elected.
The story goes all the way to the white house and to royal families in Abu Dhabi and Saudi, to Chinese govt.’s protection for Jho Low once the scandal came to light. It takes different level of guts to do something like this where even the Prime Minister of a country and his wife are in prison but the man behind it all still roams free and still parties in his yacht with celebrities. Financial thrillers are the best kind of books to get into the habit of reading, so if you are contemplating starting somewhere, start here. 8/10
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