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Name: Billion Dollar Whale
Rating: 4.5 (158 reviews)
Author: Tom Wright and Bradley Hope

Tom Wright and Bradley Hope

The Man Who Fooled Wall Street, Hollywood, and the World

4.5 (158 Bewertungen)

30 Min.

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Billion Dollar Whale
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What’s in it for me? The unbelievable true story of a Malaysian fraudster.

Wharton, America’s oldest business school, offers prospective students a simple deal in return for just north of $50,000 a year: a crash course in capitalism. But Jho Low, a mild-mannered kid who styled himself as an Asian prince, wasn’t there to study – he wanted access to the world’s wealthiest families.

He got it. The connections he forged at the Pennsylvanian institution led him into a shadowy world of oil money, poorly controlled state investment funds and high-wire financial deals. Leveraging his contacts with politicians, fixers and sheiks, he inserted himself into the center of a cash-rich venture ostensibly designed to improve the lives of regular Malays.

What happened next was so audacious it hardly seems credible. One year after the great crash of 2008, a 28-year-old with no real business experience pulled off the largest heist of the century. Total damage: billions. In these blinks, we’ll show you how he did it, what he wanted and how he got caught.

Along the way, you’ll learn

how Jho Low perfected the art of deception as a schoolboy;
why Leonardo DiCaprio couldn’t turn down Low’s offer to fund his movie; and
how Low’s theft ended up toppling one of Asia’s longest-serving ruling parties.

Jho Low learned the art of deception at school while trying to keep up with his wealthy peers.

This is a story of financial fraud, dodgy deals and deception. But it doesn’t start on a Wall Street trading floor. It begins in a leafy borough in northwest London in 1998, the year a pudgy and shy 17-year-old boy from Malaysia called Jho Low started his first term at one of England’s most storied private schools.

Founded in 1572, Harrow School charges just under $16,000 a term to educate the children of the world’s elite. Its alumni include seven British prime ministers, an Indian prime minister and six Middle Eastern monarchs. When Low arrived, he found himself rubbing shoulders with the heirs to the thrones of Brunei and Kuwait.

Now, Low wasn’t exactly poor himself; he was the son of a Chinese-Malaysian businessman who had made his fortune in the garment industry in the 1990s. His family was worth around $15 million and lived in a palm-tree-fringed modernist mansion in Penang, Malaysia. Their wealth was impressive, but Harrow was different. In comparison to his classmates, Low was small fry, and he knew it.

The only way he could keep up appearances was to lie. When his new school pals visited him in Penang in 1999, he rented a local billionaire’s holiday home and yacht and replaced the real owner’s family photographs with snaps of his own parents and siblings. The ruse worked. Soon enough, his friends were referring to him as the “prince of Malaysia.” Low, who had no aristocratic pedigree whatsoever, didn’t correct them.

Eager to boost his credentials, Low began taking greater risks. In his final year, he bluffed his way into an exclusive London nightclub with a note written on a letterhead from Brunei’s embassy and spent the night partying with Premier League soccer players and models.

But Low’s behavior wasn’t merely opportunistic; it was a direct outgrowth of the morally relativistic worldview he was developing under the influence of his classmates. One of them, Riza Aziz, was the stepson of Malaysia's infamously corrupt defense minister, Najib Razak.

Low was fascinated by what his friend told him about Najib, especially his habit of granting licenses in exchange for kickbacks. It was a revelation – if everyone was on the take, why shouldn't he get his cut too? He’d already learned that power and prestige, however fake, opened doors. All he needed now was an opportunity. After graduating in 2000, Low headed to the United States to find one.

Low’s canny cultivation of influential peers led him to Abu Dhabi and the Gulf States.

In 2001, Low enrolled at the business-focused Wharton School in Philadelphia. Intelligent but lazy, he neglected his studies and focused on socializing. He hosted lavish, champagne-fuelled parties at which sushi was served on the bodies of dancers wearing nothing but lettuce-leaf bikinis. Soon enough, students were calling him the “Asian Great Gatsby.”

Low showed little sign of enjoying these events. While others downed high-end tequila and danced, he nursed a Corona and made awkward attempts at small talk. But partying wasn’t a leisure activity for him – it was a calculated investment sponsored by his father, Larry, a social climber who knew the value of connections.

Low used his contacts in the Gulf to put himself on the map as a deal maker in Malaysia.

If you wanted to get to know the leading movers and shakers in the Emirates in the early 2000s, the name Khaldoon Khalifa al-Mubarak would have been at the top of your get-to-know list. Like Otaiba, Mubarak was closely connected to the royal family. But he had another string to his bow.

Mubarak had access to money – lots of it. As director of Mubadala, a state-owned investment company or sovereign wealth fund established in 2002, he controlled $3.5 billion by the time Low met him. The idea behind the fund was simple: borrow against the UAE’s future oil revenues and use that cash to diversify the economy by investing in new sectors like technology and real estate.

A political upset in 2008 gave Low the Malaysian prime minister’s ear.

The 2007 Iskandar deal left Low stranded financially but well-situated politically thanks to his alliance with the rising political star Najib Razak. That, however, looked like a long-term investment. As long as Najib lacked any real power, Low needed a project of his own.

Inspired by Khaldoon al-Mubarak, Low toyed with the idea of creating a new sovereign wealth fund and installing himself as its director. That called for cash. But where was he going to find it?

Low began plotting to shake down Malaysia’s new sovereign wealth fund within months.

When Najib Razak became prime minister of Malaysia in 2009, he had two goals. First, he wanted to restore UMNO’s credibility. Second, he wanted to modernize Malaysia and catch up with the “Asian Tigers” – nations like Singapore and Taiwan whose economies had boomed between the 1960s and 1990s. Both projects required money.

Low convinced Najib that there was only one credible source of investment, the Middle East, and only one man who could make it happen – himself. A few months after assuming office, Najib announced the creation of a sovereign wealth fund called 1Malaysia Development Berhad or 1MDB with $1.4 billion of bonds to its name. Najib was the official chair, but it would be Low – who remained unmentioned in the official paperwork – who pulled the strings.

Low pulled off his heist with the help of a pliable banking system and biddable experts.

Low used his position as 1MDB’s unofficial head honcho to pack the venture with his cronies and associates. Getting them in place was vital to the second stage of his plan to exploit this Malaysian gold mine.

In early September 2009, Low set up a joint venture account with BSI, the private Swiss bank that handled PetroSaudi’s accounts. But there was a hitch. When Low traveled to Geneva to meet BSI’s account managers and explained that he’d be taking a cut of the $1 billion payment about to be wired from Malaysia, they balked.

Low burned through millions as he began building an empire of influence in the United States.

Low’s heist wasn’t a carefully constructed Ponzi scheme or a sophisticated bit of financial wizardry; it was daylight robbery. He simply took millions of dollars out of one account and put them into another – his own. Neither the government, which issued the funds, nor the banks, which processed them, tried to stop him.

So what was his plan – after all, surely someone was going to notice a $700-million hole in 1MDB’s accounts? Low didn’t have a plan. Things had moved quickly after the establishment of 1MDB, and he had gotten used to improvising. He trusted his ability to ad-lib his way out of any trouble that might come his way.

Low announced his arrival in showbusiness by agreeing to fund The Wolf of Wall Street.

Leonardo DiCaprio was already Hollywood royalty when he met Low in late 2010. The star of countless blockbusters including Titanic, one of the highest-grossing movies of all time, he was used to being courted by hangers-on. Wherever he went, folks did him favors, and he regarded that as something to which he was entitled rather than a perk. Low, however, wasn’t your average fanboy.

DiCaprio might have had plenty of money of his own, but there was one thing he couldn’t afford – independence from Hollywood’s studios. And that’s what Low offered him.

A disgruntled insider ended up blowing the lid on the 1MDB scandal and exposing Low.

Low completed another deal in 2012. This time he’d teamed up with the International Petroleum Investment Company or IPIC, an Abu Dhabi-controlled sovereign wealth fund. On May 21, 1MDB wired $1.75 billion to a front organization supposedly in the market for Asian power plants. Days later, $576 million of that money landed in an IPIC-linked bank account. It was another fake “loan repayment” that once again found its way into Low’s hands.

Here was the rest of the capital that was used to make The Wolf of Wall Street, pay off Najib’s Malaysian voters and continue financing Low’s lavish lifestyle. But there was a hitch – there were still loose ends from Low’s first heist.

The fallout of the 1MDB heist caused a political earthquake in Malaysia, but Low remains at large.

News of Low’s theft triggered a civil war in the ruling UMNO party. A reformist faction led by former prime minister Mahathir Muhamed called for Najib’s resignation and a wide-ranging investigation into the 1MDB scandal. Najib was confident he could weather the storm but took the precaution of ordering Low to leave the country before the parliamentary Public Accounts Committee had a chance to question him.

The public mood was rapidly deteriorating. In late August 2015, around 100,000 protestors took to the streets of Kuala Lumpur. They came from every walk of life and voiced their anger as well as their fear that the debts incurred by 1MDB would leech funds away from education and social welfare for years to come.

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Worum geht es in Billion Dollar Whale?

Billion Dollar Whale (2018) is the definitive account of how a quick-witted and calculating Malaysian social climber called Jho Low defrauded a national investment fund and pulled off one of the twenty-first century’s most audacious heists. The fruit of years of painstaking research by two of America’s top investigative journalists, it sheds light on the shadowy workings of a globe-spanning network of swindlers, crooks and hustlers.

Bestes Zitat aus Billion Dollar Whale

At that moment, in late 2009, Low had access to more liquid cash than almost anyone on earth.

—Tom Wright and Bradley Hope

Wer Billion Dollar Whale lesen sollte

True-life story fanatics who love a rip-roaring yarn
Would-be detectives with a feel for finance
Number-crunchers, bankers and accountants

Über den Autor

Tom Wright is a Wall Street Journal reporter best known for his coverage of the death of Osama bin Laden and the 2013 collapse of the Rana Plaza factory in Bangladesh. Wright regularly reports from Malaysia was named 2016 Journalist of the Year by the Society of Publishers in Asia.

Bradley Hope is a financial journalist and an expert on fraud, corruption and malfeasance. Now based in London and New York, Hope spent many years covering the Arab Spring uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East. He is the author of Last Days of the Pharaoh, an account of the downfall of Egyptian strongman Hosni Mubarak.

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