Clare Rewcastle Brown: The Sarawak Report | Event Highlights

THE BOOK
The Sarawak Report is the stranger-than-fiction tale of how one woman uncovered the world’s biggest theft which, in May 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. 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.
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, and 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.
THE SPEAKER
Clare Rewcastle Brown is a British journalist and the founder and editor of the website Sarawak Report, which has come to prominence for challenging wide-scale political corruption in Malaysia and its impact on civil and indigenous rights as well as on the environment.
Her investigations resulted in the exposure of the 1MDB Development Fund scandal, which revealed grand kleptocracy by the Malaysian Prime Minister; rocked the global financial community; helped put the off-shore finance industry on the run and embarrassed some of the most famous figures in Hollywood, Vegas and New York.
Fortune Magazine named her one of the World’s 50 Most Influential Figures in 2016 and she was awarded the Guardian Award for International Fraud Reporting 2018 among many other awards.
The Malaysian government issued a warrant for her arrest in 2015 and requested INTERPOL to place her on the international Red Notice list. However, INTERPOL rejected the request and, following the election of a new government in May 2018, the new Malaysian government cancelled all charges against her.