Clare Rewcastle Brown

Clare Rewcastle Brown (born 20 June 1959) is a British environmental and anti-corruption journalist and activist who uncovered the 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB) scandal. Born in the former British Crown Colony of Sarawak (now part of Malaysia), she is the founder and operator of the Sarawak Report blog and Radio Free Sarawak which have exposed corruption driving deforestation and human rights violations in that state along with failures in the global financial systems which facilitate kleptocracy. In 2015 she shifted her focus to the federal government of Malaysia and the country's prime minister, Najib Razak. Her blog Sarawak Report gained widespread recognition for its original and early exposure of the 1MDB scandal which eventually toppled the Barisan Nasional government and was described by the US Department of Justice as its largest ever kleptocracy case.

Early life, education and career
Rewcastle Brown was born in colonial Sarawak on 20 June 1959 to British parents (before the territory formed a part of Malaysia) and attended a local primary school in the neighbouring state of Sabah. Her father John Rewcastle held a senior position in special branch. Her mother Karis Rewcastle taught midwifery and helped look after indigenous babies at remote clinics. She moved to the United Kingdom when she was eight, attended private boarding school, then went to university at King's College London and subsequently obtained her master's degree in international relations from the London School of Economics. She became a journalist, joining the BBC World Service in 1983. She later moved to BBC current affairs television as a producer, then worked as a reporter for Sky TV and subsequently as a news and features correspondent for ITV's Carlton Television.

Sarawak Report and Radio Free Sarawak
During a visit to Sarawak in 2006 to speak at an environment conference, Rewcastle Brown was asked by local journalists and activists to help publicize the deforestation in the state. However, when she began probing the issue, she was banned from the state and received death threats.

In February 2010, she founded Sarawak Report, a blog seeking to highlight the destruction of Sarawak's tropical rainforests for profit and alleged corruption by the state government led by Chief Minister Abdul Taib Mahmud. Sarawak Report alleges that Taib and his family have profited from the land taken away from Sarawak's indigenous communities and have multiplied their wealth in assets and properties across the world.

In December that year, Rewcastle Brown also set up Radio Free Sarawak to broadcast her findings on the radio to local Sarawakians. Radio Free Sarawak's first DJ was Peter John Jaban, who was fired by one of Sarawak's state-controlled radio stations for allowing callers to criticize Taib. Brown met Jaban in 2008 while reporting on a by-election in Sarawak and invited him to become the voice of Radio Free Sarawak in London.

Before February 2011, Sarawak Report and Radio Free Sarawak operated anonymously. However, Rewcastle Brown and Jaban decided to go public after one of her informants, a former Taib aide, was found dead. Ross Boyert, who used to head Taib's supposed real estate arm in the United States, was found dead in a Los Angeles hotel room with a plastic bag over his head in September 2011. Boyert had claimed that he and his family had been harassed since he filed a lawsuit against the real estate company in 2007.

During the period leading up to the April 2011 Sarawak state election, Rewcastle Brown said Sarawak Report was forced constantly to switch its internet address after an onslaught of cyber attacks. She blamed the ruling Barisan Nasional coalition for the disruption. She also claimed that Radio Free Sarawak's signal was jammed by a Belgian agent hired to broadcast at the same frequency as the station.

Malaysian Deputy Information Communication and Culture Minister Joseph Salang Gandum called Radio Free Sarawak illegal as it was not licensed with the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission. However, it was broadcasting from outside Malaysia via shortwave and therefore required no Malaysian licence. In March 2011, Taib's party, Parti Pesaka Bumiputera Bersatu (PBB), filed a police report against Radio Free Sarawak.

Rewcastle Brown was banned from entering Sarawak in July 2013. She arrived at Kuching International Airport in Sarawak, only to be detained at the airport and put back on a plane for Singapore. The former Chief Minister of Sarawak Abdul Taib Mahmud was known to bar his critics from entering the Sarawak state.

On 1 August 2015, Najib addressed United Malays National Organisation (UMNO) delegates in Seremban and, in a clear reference to Rewcastle Brown, demanded that "white people" stay out of Malaysia's affairs.

1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB)
Beginning in July 2013, Rewcastle Brown queried on her blog the involvement of the major US bank Goldman Sachs in the raising of bonds worth $6.5 billion for a Malaysian quasi sovereign wealth fund 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB) set up in 2009 under the direct control of Najib Razak, who was then both prime minister and finance minister. She obtained and released through Sarawak Report previously unpublished details of the offer document which showed that Goldman Sachs had made unwarranted profits (later proven to amount to $600 million) on the bonds, linked to a guarantee by the Abu Dhabi wealth fund Aabar and its parent company the International Petroleum Investment Company (IPIC).

In December 2013, she publicly challenged the involvement of Najib’s behind-the-scenes manager of the fund, the Malaysian businessman and playboy Jho Low, in the funding of the $100 million dollar movie The Wolf of Wall Street produced by Najib’s stepson Riza Aziz. She queried if some of the money from 1MDB, the whereabouts of which was unclear, might have been invested in the movie and spent on the lavish living of Jho Low and Najib’s notoriously extravagant wife, Rosmah Mansor, and his family. As a result she received several legal threats.

Sarawak Report continued to raise concerns about Jho Low’s business dealings and their connection to 1MDB’s funds, culminating in an exposé on February 28th 2015, in collaboration with The Sunday Times, where Rewcastle Brown published documents detailing the theft of $1.83 billion from 1MDB’s first investment – a so-called joint venture with a shell company named PetroSaudi. The documents were provided to her by a former director of PetroSaudi, Xavier Justo. His former colleagues at the company, who were in an alleged criminal conspiracy with Najib and Jho Low to defraud 1MDB, later succeeded in engineering Justo’s 18-month imprisonment in Thailand.

Following the initial exposé, Najib’s government redoubled its targeting of Rewcastle Brown. She was banned from the entire country, her site was blocked and Malaysia issued a warrant for her arrest and requested that INTERPOL issue a Red Notice to enforce the arrest warrant worldwide on charges of ‘fake news’ and ‘activities detrimental to parliamentary democracy’ (INTERPOL rejected the request). Responding to the arrest warrant, Rewcastle argued that it was the Malaysian government who was "detrimental to parliamentary democracy" by suppressing free speech (closing down two newspapers) and removing officials who attempted to investigate the 1MDB affair.

Over the following few years, Rewcastle Brown continued to uncover and publish further exposés on aspects of the widening 1MDB affair showing, among other things, that most of the billions raised in the Goldman Sachs bonds had been stolen and moreover that at least $681 million had gone into Najib’s personal bank account to fight the 2013 election in Malaysia and fund his lifestyle. She passed this information and introduced some of her sources to journalists at The Wall Street Journal whose publication of it and further focus on the scandal brought it to wider international attention.

Rewcastle Brown had also contacted and passed all her information to the Department of Justice in the United States and its Kleptocracy Asset Recovery Unit. In 2016 the US published the details of a massive asset seizure in the United States – its largest to date – which were the criminal proceeds of money laundering from 1MDB.

In July 2016 Rewcastle Brown began to uncover and reveal the role of Chinese state construction companies in helping to launder further billions raised by Najib through inflated contracts for railways and petroleum pipelines. The money was diverted as part of an attempted cover up operation to pay the vast debts (US$11 billion) owed by 1MDB as a result of the earlier thefts. In 2020 she published further evidence that proved much of this money (up to US$2 billion) was channelled through bank accounts belonging to Sheikh Sabah Jaber Al-Mubarak Al-Sabah, the son of the then Prime Minister of Kuwait, held at the Kuwait branch of the Chinese bank ICBC. Much of the money was then used to repay loans provided by 1MDB’s supposed guarantor IPIC in Abu Dhabi. Sheikh Sabah and his collaborators were found guilty and imprisoned in Kuwait in 2023.

In 2018 the Barisan Nasional government, which had controlled Malaysia since independence, was voted from office, in a result which was generally seen as fallout of the 1MDB affair.

When the new government came to power the arrest warrant for Clare was lifted and she was able to set foot in Peninsular Malaysia again where she received much media attention on her return. Sarawak, however, controls its own immigration and did not remove its ban on her entry. A series of criminal prosecutions were then launched in Malaysia against the former prime minister Najib Razak for his role in the affair. He was found guilty and has been jailed while related cases continue to go through the courts.

Target of harassment and smear campaigns
Rewcastle Brown has been subject to harassment, spying and smear campaigns, online and in person, which have often turned out to emanate from Western PR firms commissioned by the subjects of her investigations whose criminality she has brought to light. Meanwhile Sarawak Report has been subject to numerous cyber attacks.

In August 2011, Sarawak Report highlighted the fact that FBC Media, a media production company which produced programs for CNBC and the BBC among others, had been doubling as a public relations firm for Malaysian politicians, including Chief Minister of Sarawak Abdul Taib Mahmud. It alleged that FBC produced shows designed to cover Taib and the state government in a positive light and that it was performing similar services for corrupt regimes across the globe. In light of the revelations, CNBC cancelled World Business, a programme produced by FBC, while the BBC suspended all FBC-produced shows from their programming.

Rewcastle Brown had earlier suggested that the PR firm was part of a network commissioned by Taib to conduct a "defamation campaign" against her, including hiring journalists from a right-wing American blog The New Ledger to publish attacks on her. She also accused the PR firm hired by Taib of creating a "rival" website called Sarawak Reports, to attack her and post "propaganda material promoting Taib," and of editing her Wikipedia entry to include false allegations from such attack sites. The "rival" blog has since been taken down while FBC Media went into administration on 24 October 2011.

In December 2011 it further emerged that Rewcastle Brown's Wikipedia entry was one of many secretly targeted by PR firm Bell Pottinger which had also created other online defamation websites targeting Sarawak Report. In an article on Bell Pottinger's defamation efforts, the New Yorker magazine described the firm's use of these practices to target Rewcastle Brown as '“fake news” before it had a name.'

In 2015 Rewcastle Brown complained to Facebook that she had again become the target of an online defamation campaign, now using fake Twitter and Facebook profiles boosted through Facebook’s paid promotion services. However, Facebook and Twitter refused to cease promoting the defamatory content on the grounds the journalist was a fair target according to their rules.

At the same time Rewcastle Brown was subject to stalking and harassment in London by presumed agents of Malaysia’s secret service, a stream of legal threats from UK law firms working on behalf of those whose criminality she had written about and approaches by supposed journalists actually working for PR and private investigation firms variously attempting to collect information on her and conduct hostile interviews which they hoped to be able to use to discredit her.

Criminal prosecution
Rewcastle Brown has been the subject of a criminal libel prosecution for allegedly defaming the Sultanah of Terengganu that was launched in the courts in Malaysia in 2021 during the 2020-2023 return of a ‘backdoor’ Barisan Nasional-allied government. The case centred on whether a phrase in Rewcastle Brown’s book The Sarawak Report implied that the Sultanah had exercised undue influence in Terengganu state affairs.The criminal prosecution occurred in parallel to a civil case over the same matter brought by the Sultanah against Rewcastle Brown and the book’s distributor and printer.

In 2021 the courts issued an arrest warrant for Rewcastle Brown for failing to attend the initial hearing; she responded that she had never heard about the hearing prior to the issuance of the arrest warrant. Rewcastle Brown unsuccessfully tried to get the case transferred from the Terengganu magistrates court to the Malaysian federal court. In February 2024 she was tried in absentia (again without being informed of the trial), convicted in the Terengganu court and sentenced to two years in prison. The conviction was condemned by many Malaysian and international journalism organisations including the Centre for Independent Journalism, Reporters Without Borders, Index on Censorship, the International Federation of Journalists, the International Press Institute and Media Defence. Sarawak indigenous rights organisations also condemned it. Rewcastle Brown is appealing the conviction and INTERPOL has again declined to issue an international arrest warrant for her.

Target of civil legal action
Rewcastle Brown has been the target of frequent legal correspondence and action in relation to her journalism, examples including:


 * In January 2011, law firm Mishcon de Reya acting on behalf of Chief Minister of Sarawak Abdul Taib Mahmud’s daughter Jamila and son-in-law Sean Murray threatened legal action in a series of letters if she did not remove articles from Sarawak Report about the source of their firm Sakto’s funds. She declined to remove the articles and the law firm took no further action.
 * In January 2014, law firm Loeb & Loeb acting on behalf of Riza Aziz’s film production company Red Granite threatened legal action in a series of letters if she did not remove articles from Sarawak Report about the source of Red Granite and Aziz’s funds. She declined to remove the articles and the law firm took no further action.
 * In August 2018, law firm Schillings acting on behalf of Jho Low (already at the time a fugitive from international justice for his role in the 1MDB scandal and liable to immediate arrest if he entered the United Kingdom) threatened legal action against the publisher of The Sarawak Report: The Inside Story of the 1MDB Exposé to attempt to prevent publication of the book in the UK that autumn. The publisher of another book about the scandal set to be published in the UK around the same time, Billion Dollar Whale, was likewise threatened with legal action. As a result both publishers cancelled UK publication of the books but Rewcastle Brown self-published her book on schedule and Billion Dollar Whale was published by another publisher the following year. The law firm took no further action against the authors and publishers but – in an apparently unprecedented campaign to prevent publication of a book – wrote emails and letters to hundreds of bookshops around the world threatening legal action against them if they stocked the books. Those bookshops that ignored the threats and stocked the books were subject to no further action.
 * In 2021, law firm Taylor Wessing acting on behalf of Hamad Al-Wazzan threatened legal action in a series of letters if she did not remove articles from Sarawak Report about Al-Wazzan’s role in laundering 1MDB funds in Kuwait. She declined to remove the articles and the law firm took no further action.

Hadi Awang's libel case
In 2017 the law firm Carter-Ruck brought a case in the London courts on behalf of Hadi Awang, the President of the Malaysian Islamic Party (PAS), that was settled in Rewcastle Brown’s favour in 2019. The case related to a 2016 article on Sarawak Report in which she had alleged that Prime Minister Najib Razak’s UMNO party had been secretly funding PAS (supposedly part of the opposition) with payments said by some to total RM90 million. The article did not name Hadi but he claimed that it nevertheless implied that he personally had been in receipt of corrupt payments and was therefore personally defamed. The suit was brought with the support of PAS. Rewcastle Brown responded by putting before the court evidence of high-level spending by PAS leaders and of cash transfers made by UMNO officials in favour of PAS entities. She also filed a counter claim alleging a campaign of harassment and abuse by bloggers sympathetic to PAS. After running up purported bills of well over a million pounds at Carter-Ruck, Hadi reached a settlement with Rewcastle Brown as part of which she reportedly received a payment of RM1.4 million (£360,000) towards her own costs. She did not remove the article from her website or make changes to it.

Sultanah of Terengganu's libel case
The civil case brought by the Sultanah of Terengganu in 2018 in the Malaysian courts against Rewcastle Brown centred on whether a phrase in Rewcastle Brown’s book The Sarawak Report implied that the Sultanah had exercised undue influence in state affairs. Rewcastle Brown’s Malaysian distributor, Gerakbudaya Enterprise publisher Chong Ton Sin, and printer, Vinlin Press Sdn Bhd, were co-defendants. The Sultanah’s lawyers demanded RM300 million (approximately $100 million) in damages.

In December 2023, Rewcastle Brown and her co-defendants were ordered to pay RM300,000 in defamation damages (a thousandth of the sum the Sultanah had demanded) and RM120,000 in legal costs to the Sultanah. They are appealing the verdict.

Rewcastle Brown was a speaker at the first two annual conferences of the UK Anti-SLAPP Coalition which focuses on tackling ‘lawfare’ and the vexatious misuse of legal systems to stifle public interest reportage.

Publications
Clare Rewcastle Brown is the author of two books which are first-hand accounts of her role in exposing the 1MDB scandal. (The latter book, co-authored with Eddie Barnes, is an abridged version of the former.)
 * The Sarawak Report: The Inside Story of the 1MDB Exposé (2018) ISBN 9781527219366
 * The Wolf Catcher: The true story of how one woman exposed the world's biggest heist (2019) ISBN 152724475X

She is also the author of a chapter, 'Malaysia: a case study in global corruption', in the third edition of Investigative Journalism, published by Routledge, and co-author (with Caleb Diamond) of another chapter, 'Sovereign Wealth Funds as Vehicles for Money Laundering: The Case of 1MDB', in Sovereign Wealth Funds: Corruption and Other Governance Risks, published by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Awards and accolades

 * International Press Institute’s Pioneer of Media Freedom Award (2013)
 * Queensland University’s Communication for Social Change Award (2014)
 * One World Media Special Award (2015)
 * Fortune Magazine named her one of the World’s 50 Greatest Leaders (2016)
 * Great Britain’s Women of the Year Award (2016)
 * Guardian Award for International Fraud Reporting from the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners (2018)
 * Environmentalist of the Year Award from the Bob Brown Foundation (2018)
 * United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime/Sheikh Tamim Bin Hamad Al Thani International Anti-Corruption Excellence Award for investigative journalism from the Rule of Law and Anti-Corruption Center (2023)

Media appearances
Rewcastle Brown has frequently appeared on television throughout her career, latterly to talk about the 1MDB scandal and kleptocracy more generally. A selection of her appearances include:


 * The Fight for Sarawak (Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), April 2011)
 * Family Trees (Canadian Global News, December 2011), about the Taib family property company Sakto Corporation in Canada
 * The Last Frontier (101 East, Al Jazeera and Dateline, SBS, August 2012), on Australian investment in Sarawak's dam and timber business and its links to Chief Minister of Sarawak Abdul Taib Mahmud's cousin Hamed Sepawi
 * House of Saud: A Family at War (BBC, 2018)
 * This Giant Beast That is the Global Economy (2019)
 * Dirty Money (Netflix, 2023)

She has also featured in a number of documentary films:


 * The Borneo Case (2016), a documentary about the devastation of Sarawak
 * M for Malaysia (2019)
 * Wirecard: The Billion Euro Lie (Sky, 2021)
 * Man on the Run (Netflix, 2023)

Personal life
Clare Rewcastle Brown is married to Andrew Brown, the younger brother of former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown.