Hello! Welcome to the Joe Low episode of Slate Money Criminals. I'm Felix Amonib Axios,
I'm here with a little bit of a spires of The New York Times and elsewhere. Hello.
And we are joined from Singapore by Tom Wright. Welcome, Tom. Thanks for having me.
Tom, who are you? And what brings you on this show? Well, I am a journalist. I was going to say
a retired journalist, but you're always a journalist. I'm the co-author of a book, Billion Dollar
Whale, about Joe Low and one of the biggest frauds in history. And I'm the co-founder of Project
Brazen, which is a podcast company. We make podcasts based on thrilling true stories.
We are going to talk about Joe Low in this episode. It's not easy to steal six billion dollars,
but he managed to do it. We're going to talk about how he managed to do it, whether it was
a Ponzi scheme, who the victims were, who his accomplices were, and where it all stands today.
That's all coming up on Slate Money Criminals.
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So, who is this guy? Why was he worthy of turning into a book? And then, I guess after that,
you can bring us up to speed on what's happened over the past five years.
Well, Jolo is one of the largest, most successful white collar criminals in history. He
helped defraud at least $6 billion out of a state fund in Malaysia, and the proceeds went on a
wide range of things, including making films like The Wolf of Wall Street,
to pay Paris Hilton, to hang out with him, to pay Leonardo DiCaprio, to gamble with him,
to invest in some bona fide businesses, like EMI Music Publishing and Hotels in Manhattan,
and all of this. Jolo carried this off by persuading the Prime Minister, then Prime Minister of
Malaysian Najib Razak to allow him to sort of run this state fund from behind the scenes,
this Malaysian state fund. And it's as simple as he just stole the money, really, with the
connivance of bankers from Goldman Sachs and private bankers from Switzerland, and all this
cost of characters, which shows that money talks. So that's the sort of 10,000-foot view of Jolo.
The fun thing about the Jolo scam is that with most of these scams, you have to sort of find a
patty, right? Like, if you are, say Bernie Madoff, you are constantly on the lookout for people to
give you their money, and then you're going to steal that money and not give it back.
In the case of Jolo, it's a little bit different. What happened was he managed to persuade
this thing called 1MDB, this official institution to borrow $6 billion. And that then became
sovereign debt of Malaysia. And the people who bought those bonds, they continue to get paid
back in full, right? Yeah, I mean, that's where Goldman Sachs come in. Goldman Sachs helped
Malaysia to raise the money. And I believe there was even some sovereign guarantees at some point
from the Middle East, right? Yeah, and there was a Middle Eastern fund that backs some of the
bonds as well, yeah. And that the head of that Middle Eastern fund was also in on the whole scam.
So what you have in this case is the victims, rather than being people who trusted Jolo and like,
you know, what won over by his smooth talking or anything like that, the victims were just
the taxpayers of Malaysia, who for many, many years into the future are going to have to continue
to service this debt. Yeah, exactly. I mean, you rightly point out that this isn't really a pyramid
scheme. Oh no, in fact, it is not a pyramid scheme. You know, Bernie Madoff's a pyramid scheme,
the last money in gets screwed. And, you know, some of the early investors did get paid off,
and that Bernie Madoff's fraud took 40 years. We have a podcast coming out next month about crypto,
Sam Bankman, Fried and Changping Zhao. You can argue that that's also a pyramid scheme, right?
You've got to get the mom and pop investors to invest in crypto to rip them off to steal that
customer money. Yeah, and in this case, billions of dollars issued overnight in an environment
when interest rates were very cheap after the global financial crisis. And, you know, the money
just stolen with the connivance of big bankers. And yeah, the victims are the people of Malaysia.
We've read various headlines about Goldman Sachs settling for so many billions of dollars and
whatnot. How much of the total stolen money has been recovered so far? Well, you know, the US seized
around a billion plus of assets. This is stuff like, they actually seized the proceeds of the
wolf of Wall Street, the hotels in New York, and the mansions in Beverly Hills, and all of this
stuff. And that was a couple of billion. As you said, Goldman Sachs got fined a lot of money.
I think it's the largest ever fine under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act in the US.
Malaysia wants even more back. But, you know, if the total, I think that's so shocking about this
five years on, and we're going to get to where is Jolo, billions of it has not been recovered
of the at least six billion that was stolen. And Jolo himself has not been brought to justice yet.
And so those are these questions that haven't been answered, you know, five years after the book
came out, and a number of years after this will come out into the public eye. So where do you see
Jolo as? Well, we know where he is actually. So in whale hunting, our newsletter,
have a company called Project Brazen, and I co-founded with Bradley Hope with whom I wrote the book,
and we were colleagues at the Wall Street Journal. We have this newsletter called whale hunting,
and we've actually been following Jolo, and we have a YouTube series about where is Jolo as well.
He's in China, and he's been given ever since he sort of went on the run. He's been
indicted in the US, and also in Malaysia, and just a quick aside, his protector, the former
Prime Minister of Malaysia, and Natyab is serving a 12-year jail sentence at the moment,
in Malaysia. So there has been some justice in the case, but Jolo is in China, and he's protected
by China, and the reasons for that are pretty complicated, but we should probably get into them.
Yeah, what are the reasons, and is he living a life of luxury on the billions that he stole
from the Malaysian people? After it came out into the public via reporting in a newspaper called
the Edge in Malaysia, and on a blog called the Sarawak report that he'd stolen billions of dollars,
Natyab Razak, who was still Prime Minister of Malaysia at the time, and this is 2015,
tells Jolo, well, you better not be seen in public in Malaysia, and he goes to China. He's
ethnically Chinese Malaysian, so he goes to China, and he continues to do Natyab's bidding,
Natyab is still Prime Minister at this time, not yet arrested and in jail, and he acts as a sort of
unofficial government minister for Malaysia, and does all these corrupt infrastructure deals
between Malaysia and China. You've probably heard of the Belt and Road, the Chinese Infrastructure
Initiative. It's much like the Marshall Plan in Europe after the Second World War. China is building
all this infrastructure across Asia and the Middle East and Africa, and they did these corrupt
deals to build a corrupt railway in Malaysia that Jolo was involved in negotiating, and the idea was
you pad these contracts, and the money that you steal from these padded contracts, you used to
fill the hole of the original fraud, the 1MDB fraud. So Jolo was involved in all of this
2016, 2017, and then Natyab loses power in an election in Malaysia. Malaysia's incredibly corrupt,
but it still does have, you know, electoral democracy, and Natyab ends up getting arrested and
going to jail for a 12-year sentence. So that's left Jolo hanging out there in China without the
protection of a head of state, and then all of the corrupt Chinese officials that were supporting
Jolo in China, people who were taking, you know, millions, tens of millions of dollars of payouts
from Jolo who still controls billions of dollars. Those guys started to get arrested by Xi Jinping's
government in China. That includes, you know, the former head of state security in China,
Sun Li Jun was one of Jolo's protectors. Jolo is now under house arrest, we know in China,
and Malaysia is involved in these, the new Malaysian government, which was not the corrupt one that
did all of this in the first place, and now involved in these negotiations with China to get
Jolo back to face justice. So one of the fascinating things about
having large amounts of money is that it's not easy to have large amounts of money if it's stolen,
right? You know, you can buy yourself a basket painting as Jolo did, and then people will
say, oh, that's the basket at the Jolo board, and it can get seized and it can get sold and
as in fact happened. You can try and open a bank account at your local bank, but then you come
along to the bank account at your local bank and say, hi, my name is Jolo. I'm an internationally
wanted fugitive who stole billions of dollars. Can I please open up a bank account to put my
billions of dollars in? And that's not going to end very well for you. So when you say that
Jolo controlled billions of dollars, you know, up until pretty recently, was that in Chinese banks?
Like, where was that money? That's a great question. Obviously, since this all came out
in 2015, he's been unable to use the US dollar and the euro banking systems. He can't, you know,
if Jolo tried to send in his own name, a wire transfer via a US chorus one, a bank, he would get
flagged because, you know, he's a risk. We know for sure he's been using cutouts and those are
friends, people that he uses to make payments. For example, he's been able to pay his lawyers for a
long time in the US and in London via cutouts. There's a guy called Feng Tian Laomongner, the
Thai friend of his, Jolo went to a very posh boarding school in the UK called Harrow,
and friends from there have acted as cutouts. His guy Feng Tian in Thailand has acted as a cutout.
You know, they would take bags of cash from Macau to Hong Kong and put it into Feng Tian's
account and then he would make payments. The bank ICBC, the Chinese bank has been used to make,
make round tripping payments in Chinese Yuan. So yeah, there's all kinds of ways. And you know,
we don't have any evidence of this, but I'm sure he's using the crypto world to move money around
these days. So yeah, there's, it's very hard to stop money laundering and especially if you still
have lots of it, right? Yeah, you mentioned before we started taping that you recently left Hong
Kong for Singapore and that it was largely Jolo related. What would happen there?
For people who haven't followed this, you're probably wondering how we know half the things I'm
saying. Well, it's all backed by reporting. And the reason we know that Jolo did all these corrupt
Belt and Road infrastructure deals in China after one NDP to try to fill the whole of one NDP
and was one of the reasons why he was protected there for so long. It's because we actually got
minutes of a meeting that the that Jolo held with Chinese ministers and that when the new government
came to power in Malaysia, you know, that somebody there gave us these minutes from the from the
government archives. You know, the Chinese government don't take minutes as far as I know of detailing
the corruption they're about to do in Belt and Road, but Jolo was stupid enough to do that. And so
we got hold of those those minutes and the in them they say, well, we're going to pad these
contracts. We need to make them look commercial. This railroad in Malaysia, but you know,
it won't be commercial and we'll we'll take out the profits and and also Jolo in that meeting
requested that the Chinese government bugged my home in Hong Kong where I was living at the time
because, you know, they wanted to figure out what we were doing because we were at the Wall Street
Journal, we were covering the story very closely. And so that was the reason that I actually
decided to leave Hong Kong once the the crackdown started to happen there with the Chinese authorities
because I just, you know, having had that history and having reported names of Chinese officials
who were still in power at that time and have since been arrested for corruption, but at that time
felt pretty uncomfortable staying in Hong Kong. That that is a while. So it does remind me of that
scene in the wire where Stringer Bell is like he he turns on his, you know, acolyte and says,
are you taking minutes of a of a criminal conspiracy? Pretty stupid. Pretty stupid. I mean,
I mean, like people say until today, this is like one of the most documented stories of corruption
in Belt and Road because normally, you know, Belt and Road, then your time's did a great story
from Sri Lanka. They'd look at the cost of the bridge or the port or whatever it was and,
you know, you sort of infer that it was corrupt because of the cost. Whereas we actually got the
document saying, yeah, let's do this at a plated price. And the idea was, I'm still kind of hung
up on this. The idea was that somehow the kickbacks on the Belt and Road stuff would be so huge
that he would end up paying back the six billion dollars that he sold still from one MDB somehow.
Well, that that last part's my inference. I mean, the problem with Jolo was we could never figure
out what the end game was, you know, because there were plenty of points where he could have stopped
the fraud at a billion dollars and probably never got caught. You know, this is great scene in the book
where he's round tripping money to try to make it one, he's trying to make one bit of money look
like multiple bits of money by sending it around and back into the same account. And instead of
stopping his big item purchasing at that time, he goes and buys a $250 million yacht at the same
time as he's trying to fool the bankers with that round tripping. So I mean, the guy, I think the
guy just thought, because as you said at the beginning, this wasn't a Ponzi scheme, right? This
was like wholesale stealing of state borrowed money. He thought he could always just write it off,
because Najib was the prime minister. So he could always just write off, you know, governments do
that all the time. They write off hundreds of millions of dollars and dad. And I just think he
thought it was, it was not real money, you know, and that he could just make it go away.
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You know, I've never tried to steal billions from a sovereign before, but one of the things that
kind of strikes me is if you were in his position, he did all these things that were just very
conspicuous. I mean, you're buying a Picasso for Leonardo DiCaprio and, you know, making these
insane purchases. What do you think was his state of mind when he was doing that? Did he just think
that everybody else was too stupid to catch on to what he was doing? Because it seems like those
things would have brought a lot more scrutiny for him. Well, when he stole his first billion back
in 2009, I just think all he wanted to do was party. He was a young guy. He was obsessed with
Paris Hilton. He would pay lots of money to hang out with him. You know, he'd pay, he would
give gambling chips to Leonardo DiCaprio. I don't think he didn't want to do much more than
just party. Eventually, that turned into a film business, Red Granite Pictures, which made the
Wolf of Wall Street with stolen funds. And Jolo, you know, told DiCaprio and Scorsese that he'd
fund their next four movies at $100 million each. So that was like the holy grail for those guys
to not have to be dependent on studios and they would they could have these four movies. They were
going to make the Irishman, which eventually they didn't because Jolo got arrested when they
financed it elsewhere. But then the later on, he did sort of try to buy some real businesses. You
know, he bought EMI Music Publishing. He bought some hotels that actually did pretty well.
EMI Music Publishing did pretty well because it was just before the streaming revolution.
So yeah, she was, you know, not a bad business man in some ways, but yeah,
be carried on steaming. The thing all of this has in common is it's just high glamour, right?
If you have billions of dollars and, you know, the first thing you want to do is just go out and party
and fill an air crowd hanging with like a bunch of celebrities and feel special and buy people
champagne and that's all well and good. And then eventually you realize, you know, there's that
famous sort of gradient card to seven doors speech that there were like more doors. You can become
bigger and more influential, you know, as a film producer in Hollywood. That's always like the big
glamorous thing that people want to do when they've become rich. And then once you've become
the film producer in Hollywood, you realize there's even other, you know, where, what are all the
film producers in Hollywood want? They, you know, they aspire to owning these glamorous hotels
or to owning a record label, you know, or, you know, something like that. And so it just,
it becomes increasingly like rarefied and aspirational. But what he's not doing is going out and
buying like a widget manufacturer in Wichita, you know, he's going out and becoming increasingly
influential at like a higher and higher level rather than just hanging out on in the gossip
pages pretty soon. He's like owning the hotels that all of the top producers are staying in.
Yeah, and he ends up dating Miranda Curve, the Australian supermodel, right, which is a sort of
apex of that for him hanging out at super balls, hanging out with Alicia Keys and her husband
Swiss Beats, recording songs in their studios. They, you know, you paid, you know, people to record
albums for his girlfriends and all that kind of stuff. So yeah, it's a lifestyle. But yeah,
what he spent very little time doing was thinking about how the fraud would be sustainable beyond
let's keep stealing Malaysian state money, right? And, you know, they, they stole that first
billion, then they got Goldman Sachs to raise billions more, which they then stole and just kept
on doing it right up until the end. So is it actually incredibly easy to buy a bunch of celebrity
friends? But yeah, that's easy. I think what Jolo did is probably difficult, right? Like the whole,
you know, like that, there's a theory that it, that, you know, it was a family affair that
his dad, he grew up on this island of Penang in Malaysia, went to this Harrow School in England.
You know, there's this idea that it was all the plans for this were laid long ago, send them to a
watch school, get to know rich people, get to know the prime minister of Malaysia's family,
worm your way in, do some brokering deals for them early in your career, and then finally get him
to let you run a sovereign well fund. But, you know, I'm condensing it there, but it's very
difficult to get someone to let you run a sovereign well fund from buying the scenes when you're in
your late 20s. So that, you know, that he's a skillful guy, you know. But also a little bit of a
cipher. Tell me a little bit about that skill, because we've heard about John Acker Blameezer,
who was like famously charming and had this great memory for individuals and people's like
personalities and foibles. We've heard about Benny Maidoff, who was very good at cultivating a
sort of mystique and trying to, you know, be very quietly making people come to him to beg to
be part of his fund. What was Jolo's technique here? What was it that allowed him to do these things
that for you and I would be completely impossible? So he started off by describing himself as a
concierge service when he was very young and still in college and, you know, he broke these deals.
What he figured out was there was a lot of money in the Middle East and Malaysia could get some of
that money and, you know, he'd be a broker between that and he worked on a big property project in
Southern Malaysia and he would take a, you know, a cut and that kind of broker role is quite
common in emerging markets, especially in Asia. But yeah, he was very obsequious, you know, he would say,
I'm the bag man, basically acting like a bag man. I'm the guy who buys everyone the drinks. I'm the
guy that rents the night at the nightclub avenue or marquee nightclubs in New York City and all
that kind of stuff. That was how he started off. And so people who, you know, and it was a front,
right? Because he was the one stealing the money. But he acted like he was very much like always
acting for someone else because Nadjib, the Prime Minister of Malaysia, was his patron, Nadjib
Sun was involved in a film company that made the Wolf of Wall Street. So he always acted like he
was sort of what he called the concierge service to rich people. And that was how he, that sort
of was his disguise in a way, right? He hit behind that. And very, but if you ask people about him
and why I said he's a bit of a cipherist, people would say it was pretty shy, nice guy. But it wasn't
like he was somebody who really charming nature that you just referred to for some of those other
fraudsters. It does remind me a bit of Jeffrey Epstein, you know, who also referred to himself as a
concierge to rich people. And who also, by all accounts, was not particularly charming. The
people would meet him and they'd be like, oh, he was a bit icky. But somehow he managed to continue
his, you know, whatever it was that he did for many, many years. Yeah, I think so. I mean,
Jola was very good at figuring out like how he could be useful to people, right? What did they
need? So in the case of DiCaprio and Scorsese, it was what film financing. So I'll get that for you.
In the case of Nadia, the former prime minister of Malaysia, he needed a bunch of money to be
able to do two things, get reelected at Malaysia where he needed tons of cash to pay off voters.
And he had a wife called Rosma Mansor who was like the, you know, Mary Antoinette or a Melda
Marcos. She's also been found guilty and is appealing at Malaysia for money laundering and corruption.
When they raided their apartments in KL after all this came out, they found quarter of a billion
dollars of loose items in there, you know, watches, handbag, Birkin handbags, this kind of stuff,
which makes Melda Marcos' thousands of pairs of shoes like, you know, pale into insignificance compared
to it. So Jolo got very close to her and figured out what she needed, right? Which was Lorraine Schwartz
Jewelry and, you know, he would fly Lorraine Schwartz in from New York to the boat and the Mediterranean
to meet Rosma Mansor where she could pick out her 20 million dollar pink diamond or whatever it was,
you know, so that's that's that's kind of role he played. And he needed her, it's quite obvious
why he needed her or at least her husband. He didn't really need Scorsese into character,
right? They didn't do much for him except for sort of, you know, making feel important.
That's the fun part. Yeah, exactly. That's the fun part. Yeah, you know, he became very close to
Swiss Beats, at least he's his husband. Swiss Beats got paid a lot of money by Jolo to to
empty events and stuff like that. And we know for sure that even after this came out and Jolo was
on the run and still partying in Bangkok, Swiss Beats was still turning up at his parties and
hanging out with him. So, you know, one of the, one of the, one of the fugies going to trouble.
Oh, yeah. So this is very confusing. The Prasmus Shell has been found guilty, the earlier this year,
of a legal campaign financing and a legal lobbying on behalf of Jolo. So when Jolo was in trouble
and he was in China, Najib was still in power. Jolo used Prasmus Shell to funnel money to try to
bribe the Department of Justice, employee called George Higgins Bottom to get Trump to drop the
probe into Jolo and was unsuccessful. But Prasmus promised, according to the court verdict,
over a hundred million dollars if he was able to get Trump to drop the case into Jolo.
I think he's appealing now and hasn't been sentenced yet. So that that's how Prasmus Shell is
involved in all of this. And there, you know, there was a crazy meeting in Shenzhen across the
border from Hong Kong with Prasmus Shell, Elliot Brody, who was one of these sort of Trump era
swamp creatures and who got pardoned on Trump's last day in office and Jolo and then all these
to crop Chinese officials, trying to work out how they were going to do a bunch of things,
including, you know, get Jolo's case dropped and get this guy, Guo Wingui, who the Chinese
want back in China, sent back from New York and all of that as Steve Bannon's friends. So it's
so complicated, but it's the, it's this world of like lobbying and big money payouts that Jolo
was using to try to try to sort of get himself out of legal jeopardy. Elliot Brody was was the guy
who came out at some point and claimed to have accidentally got some like penthouse model pregnant
or something. That's right. And like, he's like, oh, it was all me. And so I paid her off and
no one really believed him. Yeah. And he was and he was pardoned in that list of people that were
pardoned by Trump at the end of his presidency. But yeah, we saw the documents where Brody and his wife
were negotiating, you know, to get paid to help, you know, make the legal case go away. It didn't
happen. Jolo got indicted. Trump didn't, Trump didn't do anything. Didn't get involved as far as we
know. And yeah, so Jolo has these two cases against him and in, well, I think more, I think
in Kuwait as well, but also in Malaysia or in the US. And the latest information now is that the
new Malaysian government that has was not involved in this is trying to get China to send Jolo back
to face trial in Malaysia. And the Prime Minister, Anwar Abraham traveled to Beijing in March of
this year. And, you know, our sources tell us that there's an ongoing negotiation now to get
Jolo sent back, which is very delicate because obviously he was involved in all this Chinese belt
and road corruption, which the Chinese don't want coming out into the open. But, you know, from what
we understand, the Malaysians feel confident that they're going to get him back to face trial in
Malaysia. Let me ask you just quickly about how the like the Goldman Sachs angle here, because
this is this is the bit that is fun for those of us who consider ourselves, you know,
squidologists, two Goldman bankers, Roger Ang and Tim Leisner were indicted. Goldman was very
quick, institutionally, to throw those two under the bus. But when Goldman settled with the Americans,
not yet with the Malaysians, they did wind up clawing back a bunch of bonuses from people like
Gary Cohen, right? Yeah, they claw back bonuses from Lloyd Bank Fine, Gary Cohen, who was what
they were all involved in this. But yeah, they, so Goldman pleaded guilty only at the Malaysian
unit level, not at the, not at the overall bank level. So that's how, you know, they were able to
void that. Has all kind of, would have had all kinds of consequences for the bank to plead guilty
to FSPCA, Farncraft Practice Act, FCPA violations. So there, yeah, two bankers have, have sort of
gotten caught up in this. Roger Ang was a managing director and his boss was Tim Leisner
a German, who was the partner out in Singapore and Hong Kong when all this went down.
Roger unpleaded not guilty and Tim Leisner pleaded guilty. Roger Ang was found guilty and is appealing.
I think he was given 10 years in jail. And Leisner has yet to be sentenced. He was recently spotted
during the milk and conference in LA having dinner in a fine dining restaurant in Beverly Hills,
which was amazing, which was amazing to me. But he's, yeah, I mean, I think he's privately
been telling people that he's, he expects to do five years in jail. Which is, which is roughly
what Mike Malkin did. Is it? I think. I think. I need to be the suspect if you remember how long
Malkin spent in jail? That sounds about right. I don't remember exactly. Maybe one to guess out
of prison, he can try and rehabilitate himself in much the same way that Mike Malkin is attempting to
with his milk and conference. Exactly. Exactly. And he, well, he's in a world of trouble, you know,
because he's admitted to helping move $200 million through his private accounts.
He will be the first Goldman partner, I think, to go to jail in Goldman's history. So
Goldman was hoping to draw a line under all of this with paying that huge fine to the American
government a couple years ago. But the story, just like these big frauds, what kind of frauds
are just take years and years and years to work their way through the court systems. And yeah,
so we hear is that Tim Lysner is supposed to be sentenced in September, yeah, next month,
but that keeps getting delayed. And so I'm also sure. Just FYI, Malkin served 22 months and was
pardoned by Trump in 2020. He was pardoned by Trump, by the way, many, many years after he was
released from prison. But yeah, the Malkin pardon was one of the great moments of Trumpism. It's
just sort of saying, oh, yeah, this guy seems, seems perfectly good to me. No idea what the problem
was. Yeah, same time as Elliot Brody was pardoned in that same, that same list. But yeah,
the Malkin conference is great that way. You know, it's, it's famous for being the one conference
where like Leon Black is happy to hang out in public and be totally open about, you know, no shame.
Yeah, well, maybe that's why Tim Lysner was, I'm not actually sure Tim Lysner went to the
Malkin conference when it was in LA earlier this year, but he was definitely hanging with
government, a Malaysian government folk on the sidelines of it in, in post restaurants. So
as, as with all conferences, the only important stuff happens on the sidelines. Nothing
important ever happens on stage. You just hang out at the, you know, Peninsula hotel in one of
the cabanas on the rooftop and you take your meetings. Yes, exactly. Exactly. So, you know,
these are the, you know, five years on or like seven years on since the case first broke.
These are the, you know, last few things left to be finalized, I guess.
And so your expectation is that after long and involved negotiations between the Malaysian
government and the Chinese government, the Chinese government is going to realize that they have
no particular interest in protecting Jolo from Malaysia anymore. And so they will give him up
and then he will finally face trial in Malaysia. Yes, that's our understanding. I mean,
the Malaysians think that that's what the Chinese are agreeing to. And it's been a long
process of negotiations, but yeah. And the fact that China has arrested,
suddenly Jun, who was one of Jolo's big protectors at the former head of domestic security,
and then, you know, another minister was recently arrested for corruption. They never mention
in the Chinese press or in the Chinese announcements of this stuff that this is because of Jolo
or anything like that. But you know, that's my inference from the fact that these guys were some
of his, you know, closest protectors in China. So very few people managed to get swept into
Jolo's orbit without paying some kind of a praise. I guess Martin Scorsese.
Well, you know, Scorsese was given like a Jolo gave him a like 70th birthday gift of a,
I think he got a like a Polish movie poster of cabaret, was that what he gave him?
And he gave to Caprio, Marlon Brando's Oscar from on the waterfront, which
to Caprio gave back, because you're not supposed to sell an Oscar statue,
anyway, it's like I think it's a controversy academy rules. So, you know,
there's embarrassing embarrassing, but nobody's saying that Scorsese or Caprio did anything.
Oh, especially Scorsese, but no one's saying to Caprio did anything illegal, you know, he was
given all these gifts and he gave him back and he was given, I think he was given a Picasso painting
and a, you know, expensive photography and all this kind of stuff.
The Caprio got what the New Yorker recently called his greatest ever performance out of
Jolo's money. Yeah. Yeah. No, and it was going to be nice. So that's something, I suppose.
Like the Malaysian people got got robbed of six billion dollars, but at least a guy acted well
on film, right? Like, you know, exactly. Yeah, in a very, in a film about a fraudster,
who, you know, my favorite part of the book is still where Jordan Belford says he met Jolo
during the sort of beginnings of the making of the Wolf of Wall Street and these guys have
just bought Jordan Belford's memoir and he says, I knew that guy was a fraudster.
The other one takes one to know. But yeah, so, but I mean, obviously, the Malaysians knew that he
was a fraudster. But pretty obviously, also like the, the Quates he's did not, right? Like,
because they were just guaranteeing these, or did they know too? Not the Quates, the Emirates,
yeah. Oh, the Emirates, right? No, they did. I mean, you know, Cadet Marka Beisi, who was the head
of the, the IPEC sovereign wealth fund that was involved in his fraud, you know, he's, he's in
jail now in the UAE. So yeah, I mean, it took, it took some very senior people to make this
fraud work because, you know, you had the prime minister of Malaysia on one side, you had
then Jolo running the sovereign wealth fund on the Malaysian side and they would do deals with
these funds in the Middle East and, you know, those guys were also run by corrupt people. So,
that's why when they went to banks and said, hey, can you let this multi hundreds of millions
of dollar transfer through? They said, okay, you know, it's because, you know, this was government
on both sides of the transaction. No one bothered to do proper due diligence. So that was like,
basically how the fraud worked. One of my slogans that I came up with a few years ago and I have
now, because I'm old and boring, just like fall back on it instead of doing any hard thinking,
is, it's easier to turn power into money, and it is to turn money into power. And this seems to
me to be a really priming example of that. That what Jolo did was he found the most powerful people
that he could find and he took that power and he turned it into six billion dollars. And
there are lots of people with six billion dollars in the world who do not have the power of,
you know, the Malaysian prime minister, they don't run entire, they can't provide sovereign
guarantees or like issue sovereign bonds. But if you can do that, then stealing billions of dollars
is actually relatively easy. Yeah, and he did it in two places that the two key countries for this
was Malaysia and the United Arab Emirates, both of which have world law problems, right? So
in Malaysia, obviously, you know, he was able to totally subvert a government and, you know,
it ended up with Najib even selling the country out to China and through corrupt deals and
opening up, even considering opening up their ports to the Chinese, aren't Chinese navy. So,
you know, that was on the Malaysia side and then on the UAE side, you know, he was able to
do deals with the current UAE ambassador to Washington, right? This guy, Otiba, who's
Yusuf al Otiba, who's still there, still is the UAE ambassador to Washington and was very close
to Jarra Kushner and others. So, you know, there are these countries where
it's quite easy to get the powerful people in those countries to interact with you,
you know, in a way that I hope it wouldn't, you know, it's not as if any country is clean, but,
you know, there are some countries without more difficult, Jolo identified the ones where you can do it.
I'm also reminded, like since Goldman Sachs is so central to this whole story,
of the 10 commandments of Goldman Sachs that were promulgated by a famous German of
Goldman Sachs many decades ago, the first one is important people like to deal with other
important people. Are you one? And you can kind of see how you can see how the trickle down from
that commandment to what Tim Lysner did, right? Tim Lysner felt like in order to fully inhabit
his role as a partner of Goldman Sachs, he needed to become an important person in Malaysia and
Singapore and places like that and he started acting like one and he actually kind of became one
and what important people do in those countries as we have now learned is still money.
I mean Lloyd Blankfein said to a meeting of Goldman partners, senior and senior management,
be more like Tim at some point when when Lloyd Blankfein was CEO of Goldman because
he was rein-making, right? He was a deal-making partner. He was going around these
Southeast Asian capitals, Thailand, Indonesia, Philippines, Malaysia, and getting big deals for
the company and, you know, the other thing about this is if you are a partner for somebody like
Goldman in a small market like Malaysia or Southeast Asian General, it's very hard to make
those big deals, right? Like you're not doing tech deals on the West Coast or those big China
mergers, whatever it is. And so, you know, doing these kind of deals, which, you know,
Lysner ended up getting very corrupt and getting involved just as Jolo did with with Prime Minister
of Malaysia and all this kind of stuff that that was the way to do it, you know?
On which note, I think we will wrap this up. Tom, thanks so much for coming on. This has been
illuminating. We're so happy to have you back. We had you when the book came out and you will
come back. I'm sure when Jolo is finally sentenced and the massive trial takes place in Malaysia.
Well, that and also, like I said, we've got this podcast coming out about CZ of Binance and
Sound Bank when freed in their relationship. So, that's just another story.
Yeah, that one, we will definitely cover. So, yeah, Tom, thank you very much for coming on.
Thanks to Patrick Fort for producing and we will be back with a regular slate to money on Saturday.