Sarawak Report, The

The Sarawak Report is the stranger-than-fiction tale of how one woman uncovered the world’s biggest theft which, in 2018, brought down the Malaysian government.

Investigating the deforestation of Sarawak, Borneo, and the dispossession of its people, journalist Clare Rewcastle Brown followed a trail of corruption that led her to the heart of Malaysian politics and to Prime Minister Najib Razak himself. Determined that the public should know the truth, she started a blog, which became Malaysia's go-to news outlet for information that the government was trying to suppress – and whistleblowers wanted to get out. She was soon running a radio station too.

To nail down absolute proof, Rewcastle Brown criss-crossed the globe and, defying danger, pieced together the evidence of the 1MDB scandal – the theft of billions from the country’s sovereign wealth fund. Her reporting – exposing the shady dealings of international politicians, finance powerhouses, prominent PR firms, and Hollywood glitterati – convulsed Malaysian politics and reverberated around the world. The US government made its largest ever kleptocracy asset seizure, while banks and bankers fell.

Sweeping in scope, The Sarawak Report provides a jaw-dropping behind-the-scenes narrative of Malaysia’s recent turbulent political struggles, revealing, as never before, how government-funded cyber-warfare and fake news operate, and, in an era of threadbare mainstream media, demonstrating that epoch-changing investigative journalism is still possible. It is an urgent account of the reality of globalisation – and the astonishing story of how one person made a difference.

(Foreword by Gordon Brown; Introduction by Baru Bian)