Pretty much everyone around me who reads has raved about Billion Dollar Whale online. But it’s popular status also means that it’s been hard to grab a copy in the library (or perhaps I’m just lucky). So when I saw the ecopy in Overdrive, I decided to download it and woah, this is basically Crazy Rich Asians but with lots of corruption??
Billion Dollar Whale is the true and meticulously researched story of how Jho Low managed to con millions (billions?) of dollars from the 1MDB Fund to live a life of insane spending. The amount of people connected to this, from Najib to Leonardo DiCaprio and Wolf of Wall Street (I mean, Miranda Kerr dated him for a bit??) is absolutely insane and if you had told me this was a novel, I would have believed it.
Sadly, it’s all true and my Malaysian friends have absolutely been conned out of far too much money. While the Jho Low scandal was reported in the Singapore papers, I didn’t really grasp the enormity of it all until reading this, and now I understand how the Bersih movement gained so much traction.
I’m a bit shocked that all those banks allowed this to happen, but as the authors point out, the banks were also making money off Jho Low (or thought that they did) and were more willing to close an eye over it. Clearly we need more enforcement of regulation in this sector.
There’s not much I can say about this book. It’s very well written and gripping tale of how one of the greatest cons in recent history was pulled off. If you only have a cursory knowledge of Jho Low and the 1MDB scandal and you want to understand more about it, you have to read this book.
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Hi Eustacia—I wondered after I finished this book how a fraud so immense could be perpetrated by a guy like Jho Low—or anybody else for that matter! Was he just in the right place at the right time? Did he just happen to know the right people and ingratiate himself with others in order to pull the wool over so many eyes?
I’ve concluded that there is a strata of society—one I do not belong to—that operates by different standards and mores. The key that allows entry to that strata is usually determined by the money you represent or seem to represent. Once inside, normal operations rules fall apart, leading to the excesses perpetrated by Low, his associates and the banks that backed them up.
An interesting read if nothing else. Should be made into a movie before long!
Yes, it’s so confusing to me how he managed to get away with it for so long. Clearly the compliance departments of various banks failed big time perhaps because of the ‘connections’ Jho Low and his friends had.
This reminds me of the Crazy Rich Asians movie but less romance and more business corruption :p
your blog is lovely as you are the expert that you present yourself being. Best in all things to doing with tea.
Thank you so much!