Tom Wright (8)

An eye-watering story digging into the fraud behind the 1MDB scandal, in which hundred of millions of US$ were stolen from an account supposedly set up to finance infrastructure and other development projects in Malaysia.

The Whale of the title (a reference to what clubs and casinos call their big spenders) is a young Malaysian man called Jho Low, who from an early age loved to host lavish parties and throw lots of money around. On one occasion described in the book, while hanging out with show more Paris Hilton, Low spent €2m on champagne in a single night (needless to say, this bought more champagne than the whole club-ful of people could drink). But the authors are just as critical of the supposedly reputable banks, auditors and other institutions who were happy to accept and facilitate very dubious-looking deals, as long as a cut of the profits was rolling in their direction.

It's a well-written book, which helps to explain the financial flows just as well as it characterises Low's big-spending habits. One thing I found very curious was the way that Low managed to attract some genuine A-list celebrities to hang out with him. I mean, it's easy to imagine Hilton and the other Z-listers in the book making as much money as possible while they can. But Alicia Keys? Jamie Foxx? The authors explain how Leonardo di Caprio and Martin Scorsese were happy to work with Low because they got complete creative control of their work. (Low's company famously financed The Wolf of Wall Street, which it turns out Warner Bros were not willing to support because they didn't think an R rated film would make its money back. This meant that Scorsese got to crash a real Lamborghini in the opening scene - Warner Bros would have demanded he use a replica. One fascinating snippet is that one of the people who saw through Low very quickly was Jordan Belfort, the subject of Wolf of Wall Street, who after one of Low's parties apparently said "This is a fucking scam ... You wouldn't spend money you'd worked for like that.").

In a strange way, Low is a vacuum at the heart of the book. Other than wanting to be seen and to throw parties, it's hard to know what drove him. Perhaps if he ever stops being a fugitive from justice and comes to trial, we will be able to find out more. show less

The details of international banking flew over my head, but overall an extremely compelling read. The amount of research that went into this book must have been staggering, good on the authors and their research teams. Loved learning about the greed and hollywood celebrities and hopeful Jho Low and others are held accountable for this ridiculous amount of corruption and greed.

If anybody ever reads this to our current president (DJT), he is going to be more than a bit furious that there was this much better of a grifter operating at the same time as him, and on a much bigger scale, and with much happier an ending.

The subtext, of course, is that banks operating with a motive to assist in crime will, um, crime, and that maybe we should look at that some day. But the authors seem as skeptical of that ever actually happening as I am.

It's not the best book by Wall show more Street Journal reporters released in 2018, but if one is looking to understand how somebody could exploit corruption and gullibility in equal measure, than this is crucial. And if one is interested in the lives of certain callow, kind of awful, Oscar-winning actors, this will give insight into some of that also. show less

An ambitious young Malaysian, Jho Low, graduated from Penn with connections to other members of the global elites now sending their children to Ivies, including a contact with access to Gulf money. After a few false starts, he managed to convince Malaysia’s prime minister to start a sovereign wealth fund, and promptly stole hundreds of millions of dollars from it. Notable bits: (1) Just how pointless and dumb the resulting spending was—millions on champagne, on gambling, on paying models show more to hang out at his party, on gifts to Paris Hilton and other celebrities including Leonardo DiCaprio. (2) Low helped disguise his money laundering by giving his fake entities names reminiscent of well-known financial institutions like the Saudi sovereign wealth fund. (3) The discussion at the end that assumes, without explaining, that there is no alternative for Malaysia but to pay this money back. This may well be true because of the way that the debt instruments were written, but that fact itself deserved more discussion. show less