In May a decision by the Federal Court was reported as being the ‘end of the road’ for the Sipitang based Sabah Forest Industries (SFI) wound up by the courts last year. Their appeal was refused and an RM80 million compensation order by a lower court set aside pending appeal.

However, the legal complaints by the receivers that the company’s woes owe to a conspiracy and collusion between the state government and one of Malaysia’s richest men continue. Judicial Reviews against the Sabah State and a suit against the CM remain stalled in the courts.

The receivers for the company, Grant Thornton had originally accepted a RM1.2 billion buy out offer from Syed Mokhtar for which they received a 10% down payment in 2018. However, instead of completing the deal, the accountancy giant says that Mokhtar started to conspire with the incoming Sabah administration to squeeze SFI out of its assets to enable him to acquire the company for free.

Sarawak Report has already reported how the Sabah administration first confiscated the licenses on which the company value was based, on grounds of ‘public interest’, and then handed over the self-same licenses to companies said to be acting on behalf of the state, but which were in fact owned by Mokhtar himself.

By this means Mokhtar had acquired the company without having to put down the rest of the RM1.2 billion he had originally offered, argue the outraged stakeholders of SFI. Mokhtar has even sued to get back the RM100 million he did pay as his deposit.

[The] Sabah Chief Minister literally nationalised (compulsorily acquired) all SFI assets and offered only 200m (not a cent paid to date) instead of the 1.2bn tendered by SM in 2018. The Chief Minister in turn had awarded all SFI forest concessions (288,000 ha) for free to three Syed Mokhtar controlled companies. Syed Mokhtar sued SFI for the return of the 10℅ deposit paid, and offered to used that deposit in a global settlement including SFI’s claims against Sabah State and Chief Minister. In short, the collusion/conspiracy between Syed Mokhtar and CM to defraud SFI is as clear as daylight.

is how an ally of the litigating parties summarised the situation to Sarawak Report. Meanwhile, it is the company workers who have suffered most during this on-going wrangle, not least because they have apparently been targeted by the state itself due to its collaboration in undermining SFI.

Some 500 workers and their family members had been accommodated in SFI’s forestry worker settlements who were suddenly made redundant. Their wages were stopped in XXX and they received no redundancy settlements.

As the legal battles raged from 2019 the state electricity company simply switched off supplies to these isolated communities leaving them without basic amenities and forced to live off the land as best they could. The objective would appear to have been to drive this community from the area, thereby breaking up the workforce.

Likewise, the abandoned factories were mysteriously vandalised with expensive machinery belonging to SFI sabotaged as part of what appeared to be a coordinated attempt to undermine the company that the receivers were seeking to sell as a going concern.

Sarawak Report has documented other abuses, such as apparent illegal logging of the area which the state authorities sought to justify on the grounds that diseased trees were being removed (Sarawak Report identified the timber was nonetheless being exported to Sarawak – in total violation of health controls had the trees genuinely been diseased).

Now, there has been another development in that campaigners for these workers have called foul over the ‘disappearance’ of a promised state fund of no less than RM130 million that had been announced back in 2022 to bring compensation and support to help this abused and beleaguered community.

The allegation goes back to a question in the State Assembly put in November of that year on behalf of his constituents by the then Sindumin (Sipitang area) YB Dr Yusof Yacob to the Chief Minister asking whether any form of compensation had been provided to the workers of SFI?

The Chief Minister, Hajiji Noor, replied with a major commitment claiming:

“the State Government has provided approximately RM130 million in financial assistance to affected workers and their family members through a special fund established specifically to assist those who lost their source of income following the cessation of SFI’s operations”.

Three and a half years later, the community champions complain, none of those families have seen a shred of support from any such fund. The YB had recently quit the opposition Warisan Party to act as an ‘independent’ more friendly to the GRS ruling coalition and appeared not to pursue the matter further.

It has taken the election of a new member to the seat at the state election allied to the opposition to get the issue raised once more. YB Yusri Pungut is a newly elected Assemblyman representing Warisan. He is a lawyer by profession and during the recent State Legislative Assembly sitting, he questioned the Chief Minister about the RM130 million Special Fund, asking whether the money had already been distributed to the former SFI workers and, if so, who had received it. The Chief Minister responded he would reply with a written answer which is currently still awaited.

It was this state of affairs that prompted a report made to the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission last month, making the point that the Hansard record of that interchange in 2022 makes clear that money had already been set aside in a fund supposedly to support these workers.

Speaking on behalf of the workers Jeffridin Baudi has therefore asked for an investigation into what has happened to that money?

Matters he wants clarified on behalf or workers families, “many of whom continue to suffer from loss os employment and income” are:

1. The destination and use of the RM130 million ‘Special Fund’
2. The parties responsible for administering and distributing the fund;
3. The list of recipients, amounts paid, and the methodised to distribute the funds; and
4. Whether there was any element of abuse of power, criminal breach of trust, misappropriation, corruption, or other misconduct in relation to the management of the fund.

These are, of course, matters that any properly transparent State Government would have made public years ago in taking responsibility for the rights and wellbeing of citizens without jobs thanks in a large degree to state policy. According to Baudi, the MACC/SPRM has indicated it is now investigating the matter instead giving hope that answers not provided from political sources may be obtained by the anti-corruption forces instead.

The rumours swirling around Malaysia that Rosmah pledged a house in name of her son-in-law to an influential official in order to gain a Royal Pardon for Najib have caught the eye of investigative journalists at the New York Post.

After all, the property concerned, 2 Margo Way, a ‘swanky Alpine Mansion’ billed as one of  New Jersey’s most expensive homes in history, was purchased for just $10 in March of 2025, according to property records, says the Post. The buyer was indeed one of the key figures in the rumours that have circulated in Malaysia, Daniyar Kessikbayev.

‘The castle-like property had last been on the market for $34 million in 2011, before it sold a year later, in 2012, for $20 million in cash to an anonymous shell company that was linked to Kessikbayev’

Daniyar Kessikbayev is married to Najib’s daughter Nooryana Najwa Najib and is the ex-step nephew of Kazakhstan’s former dictator, Nursultan Nazarbayev.

According to the claims and documents first uploaded by an anonymous online portal in Malaysia last month, Nooryana’s mother Rosmah was involved in the purchase and then transferred the ownership through an offshore manoeuvre in May to Daran Investments Capital Inc., a British Virgin Islands registered company.  It was claimed businessman Daing A Malek Daing Rahaman was the shareholder of the company.

All of the claims pertaining to Rosmah and Daing have been denied. The Post says insiders confirm the home remains under Kessikbayev’s ownership, as reflected in the property records.

However, the New York Post’s report connects the property to a much wider scandal that hit the New York property market a decade earlier involving Rosmah’s son-in-law. Back in 2012 the 17,150 square feet, the 9 bedroom mansion (complete with its own basketball court, two pools, home theatre and bowling alley) had sold for $20 million dollars in cash to buyers whose identities were not known to the seller. It was a rushed purchase, according to the seller, the developer Joe Scott. “An older Russian man and an Oriental woman made the deal. I heard a million stories [about the owners] but I don’t care. As long as they paid me, that’s all I care about,” he told the Post.

The purchasing pair would appear to have ostensibly been, Daniyar’s mother Maira Nazarbayev, and his stepfather, Bolat Nazarbayev, brother to the notoriously kleptocratic former president of Khazakstan. However, the details were shrouded in mystery and the purchase vehicle an anonymous off-shore company.

Daniyar and his mother have a history of questionable property transactions, reminds the Post, which covered the ugly court cases after Bolat and Maira separated in which Bolat claimed he had been cheated by his wife and step-son.

Indeed, if $10 seems cheap for a New Jersey prestige mega-mansion, Daniyar previously snagged a $20 million Plaza Hotel condo for just $1.

The allegation was that the young man had been entrusted with power of attorney by Bolat, and had proceeded first to put his mother’s name on the deeds and then bought the flat from her for that one dollar.

By 2012, the couple had separated on toxic terms. Bolat first had Maira arrested under an Interpol Red Notice then filed a lawsuit against both Maira and Kessikbayev, alleging they “swindled” him out of more than $100 million, records the Post.  It was shortly after that the $20 million sale of the Margo Way was made to an anonymous shell company.

When the matter came to trial Bolat’s lawyers claimed that Maira and Kessikbayev had also bought 2 Margo Way with his money. The case was eventually settled out of court in 2014. The terms included giving Bolat the Plaza Hotel condo and other residences while he agreed to drop his claim to a stash of jewels and 2 Margo Way.

Rosmah would have been impressed and indeed Nooryna and Daniyar married the following year. It seems the couple have now benefitted from a similar looking deal whereby that New Jersey property has now been transferred to Daniyar. Whether it was passed on again, as has been suggested, to help Najib out, is not registered, as would be legally required, in any of the US records according to the Post investigation.

Read the Full Story at The New York Post

[Featured Image – left to right Daniyar Kessikbayev, Maira Nazarbayev, Rosmah, Najib, Nooryana, and stepfather Bolat Nazarbayev].

Back in 2022 Sarawak Report published list of questions it wished to put to Robin Rathmell a UK and US qualified lawyer who has represented Jho Low and his family’s myriad suits since we exposed the fraudster in 2015.

At the time, Rathmell had just returned from failed negotiations in KL with the Ismail Sabri government to buy Jho’s freedom for RM1.5 billion, mediated by Najib’s former tame Attorney General, Apandi Ali. The story leaked and the plans collapsed, however it has been noted ever since that the Red Notice published  by Malaysia for the arrest and extradition of the fraudster to the scene of his crimes in Malaysia has disappeared from the INTERPOL website.

Despite calls for that public warrant to be clearly re-instated (including by Najib’s own lawyer Shafee Abdullah) no steps have been taken to do so, implying that the negotiations around Jho Low’s freedom for favours proposals, referred to in our previous article, remain ongoing. In that article Sarawak Report revealed that Jho Low has been at the centre of negotiations to settle $3 billion of 1MDB related debts owed to China, incurred through bogus Belt & Road projects: as part of the negotiations he has demanded Malaysia’s charges be dropped against him.

Mr Rathmell declined to answer our questions about his representation of Jho Low, but there is every reason to believe he still does so and that he is behind the parallel legal attempts to buy a similar pardon deal in the United States also revealed last week. Presumably this entails working  not only through the official request published in the US but also through blandishing those around the Trump administration and private network, which is something readers of Sarawak Report will know Jho Low already has a long track-record in doing.

It is our information that such forms of blandishment also explain Jho’s continuing survival in China where he plainly represents a major flight risk given his constant attempts at negotiating an escape. Should he succeed, the fugitive holds the potential to cause China major embarrassment pertaining to his inside knowledge of the corruption of the superpower’s signature Belt & Road initiative in order to subjugate target recipients, such as Malaysia under Najib.

Subsequent to the 2022 attempt (which followed an earlier approach spurned by the Mahathir government in 2018) there has clearly been a complex and ongoing campaign to balance the incentive of alleged hundreds of millions, still locked off-shore and apparently available only to a liberated Jho Low, with obtaining free passage for the fugitive.

In 2024 the US government settled a further civil asset seizure case with the Low family, confiscating over a hundred million dollars of properties, artwork and frozen accounts which had been identified over and above the earlier asset seizures against the fraudster. However, at the time the US government made clear it had not settled the outstanding criminal charges against Jho Low as part of such a process.

Indeed, he is wanted in the United States not only for money laundering through those assets but also for assisting spies on behalf of China and subverting federal workers and lobbyists, and pals of Donald Trump and Barak Obama, to achieve various ends including espionage using his stolen cash.

Nonetheless, Jho has clearly persisted in his attempts to buy his way out of trouble, and acting as his legal representative is undoubtedly lucrative work (Sarawak Report is aware of the ‘principle’ that every fugitive oligarch deserves legal representation to defend themselves, using money they have stolen, as well as to bully journalists who expose their antics).

We noted that Robin Rathmell left the original law firm Kobre & Kim which originally represented Jho Low in the July following the May 2022 attempted negotiations in KL.  He took his toxic client to Kasowitz, Benson & Torres, according to Foreign Agent Registration (FARA) filings, and then in 2025 set himself up as a founding partner in a new ’boutique law firm’ named Rathmell Short LLP. The firm advertises itself somewhat tellingly as:

“A single focus firm that specializes in represent[ing] high-net worth individuals, their families, and their businesses in distressed circumstances around the world. Our core areas of expertise are sanctions remediation, white collar criminal defense, asset forfeiture defense, asset protection, and serious civil fraud litigation. We negotiate with the United States and other governments on behalf of our clients.”

Rathemell Short’s FARA filings indicate the firm has two such clients so far, one a Putin connected ex-KGB Russian oligarch being pursued by the US government, and a Chinese company named XH Smart Tech China Co. Ltd which is itself facing sanctions by the U.S. Treasury for supplying electronic components to Russia’s military.

Today, the ex-WSJ Jho Low watchers from the Brazen Project provided further information on that China based concern, strengthening obvious suspicions that the company is connected to Jho Low.

According to this latest research the law firm has been paid for this representation (a handsome $5.5 million fee) not by the company itself but by a third party, much in the same way that Jho Low paid Rathmell’s previous law firm Kobre & Kim through the now jailed Sheikh Sabah from Kuwait, as exposed by Sarawak Report.  The Sheikh acted as a front for money laundered from bogus Malaysian infrastructure contracts with China paying off Jho’s legal and other bills.

According to Project Brazen’s review of the FARA filings, the third party funder is a Hong Kong company called Intemath Trading Limited, which is owned by a 24 year old woman based inn Zhuhai, which they claim is “the exact same city where the sanctioned tech company is based, and where Jho Low is believed to operate”.

Several journalists have now approached Mr Rathmell for comment as did Sarawak Report back in 2022.  Let’s see if they are more fortunate than we were in receiving a reply. Likewise, let’s see if the US President agrees to issue such a pardon to Jho Low, which has been strangely termed as a request for pardon ‘after completion of sentence’. The only sentence Jho Low is known to have served is that of a gilded exile in China.

In the latest development, Malaysia’s police chief has now stated he is investigating the allegations made by Sarawak Report that Jho Low has been negotiating the removal of charges against him in KL.

The Westbourne Press, an arm of Saki books, have launched pre-sales for the upcoming book on China’s Belt & Road entanglement in Malaysia’s 1MDB cover up.  The China Contract, written by Sarawak Report editor Clare Rewcastle Brown and due for publication in October can now be ordered from The Westbourne Press and will be available through Amazon.

The filing of the plea by Jho Low for a Presidential pardon in the United States took place in January against an extraordinary background, whereby the Malaysian fraudster played a key role in secret negotiations between China and Malaysia to write off 1MDB-related debts at the end of last year, according to exclusive information obtained by Sarawak Report.

Meetings even took place involving the fugitive fraudster in KL itself under the protection of the Chinese delegation, sources have claimed.

The pardon plea was published by the Wall Street Journal overnight, just as the US President Donald Trump was boarding his flight to Beijing for a critical summit with the Chinese leader Xi Jinping. The talks will focus on the deteriorating global situation following America’s sudden initiation of hostilities against Iran, however the suggestion that the Chinese fugitive believes he can ‘buy’ a pardon by settling his debts over 1MDB brings embarrassment to both leaders.

In the US there has been a flurry of social media comment relating to the Trump administration’s existing record in providing pardons to foreign fraudsters believed to have found ways to benefit the President’s own family businesses. Meanwhile, there are huge questions over China’s own complicity in facilitating Jho Low’s record breaking fraud at the expense of the Malaysian public purse and then continuing to provide apparent refuge.

Sarawak Report has learned from its own government sources that Jho Low’s engagement in Chinese politicking and influence buying abroad has indeed continued at the highest levels. His lobbying in Washington and attempts on behalf of China to trade cash and hostages for the extradition of the wanted billionaire Miles Guo has already landed the rap star Pras Michel in jail with 14 year sentence earlier this year, likewise the republican lobbyist Nancy Lum Davis has been sentenced to two years.

Sarawak Report has also exposed the involvement of Obama’s former fundraiser Frank White in the China/Jho Low network and the former Republican chief fundraiser, Elliot Broidy, who himself escaped jail through a Presidential pardon from Trump in 2020 for advocating the Guo/Najib agenda.

Despite such exposure, Jho Low has continued to find protection at the highest levels in China, and according to our information even attended secret talks in Kuala Lumpur as part of a Chinese delegation at the end of last year to draw a line under the remaining issues with China relating to 1MDB and, more particularly, the Chinese state’s scandalous role in assisting the imprisoned former PM Najib Razak in the cover-up.

Jho Low himself was pivotal to that cover-up, whereby the embattled Najib, having been exposed by Sarawak Report and then the US Department of Justice for stealing billions of dollars from the bogus sovereign fund, raised further billions in loans from China to cover the resulting debts.

The loans, negotiated primarily by Jho Low on behalf of Najib, were on the pretext of funding Belt & Road projects that were either fraudulently inflated (the East Coast Rail Line) or never materialised (the Sabah Pipeline Project). As documents published by Sarawak Report (now confirmed by numerous court cases) have shown, the Chinese negotiators were fully aware of the fraudulent purpose and facilitated the laundering of the borrowed money through Chinese state banks and companies, primarily through Kuwait.

At the time it was widely noted that Najib concurrently signed up to key economic and defence deals that brought Malaysia more closely under the influence of China.  It also left Malaysia with enormous debts and interest payments, totalling some $3 billion for the pipeline deal alone, which have continued to hang over the heads of successive Malaysian governments tasked with repaying the enormous 1MDB debts and cover-up costs.

According to Sarawak Report’s exclusive information, Jho Low’s intricate knowledge of the situation and contacts in Malaysia played into his involvement in a key resolution of this situation by the present government which, we understand, has achieved a settlement whereby China will write off the debt in return for drawing a line under the matter and Beijing’s own sordid involvement. Conditions have included no future claims against the construction companies CCCC and China Pipeline Bureau or the two banks, Exim Bank and ICBC, who raised and laundered the money.

Far more controversial will have been the demand also that Malaysia’s Red Notice should continue to be suspended against Jho Low and future extradition efforts set aside. This appears to be a continuation of the negotiations that were initiated by Jho’s US lawyers with the Ismail Sabri government in 2022, since when the INTERPOL notice by Malaysia has been noticeably absent.

Sarawak Report has been unable to confirm the extent to which Malaysia may have pledged to withhold its prosecution of the fraudster as part of these negotiations. Today the minister in charge of the 1MDB Asset Recovery Task Force, Johari Abdul Ghani, went on record to denounce and deny knowledge of any such decision.

However, a perceived progress in the direction of settling Malaysia’s issues with China over 1MDB at the end of 2025 may well have spurred Jho Low’s US lawyers into seeking to clear his copybook in the United States by offering to pay back further 1MDB related debts (he was touting RM1.5 billion / $380 million in 2022) in return for a radically diminished sentence in that country or a free pass altogether.

It was on similar terms that both Elliot Broidy and Frank White were able to cut deals and escape jail time themselves, by surrendering up their 1MDB-related earnings to the Department of Justice. Likewise, the Goldman Sachs banker Tim Leissner, who drastically diminished his jail time by handing over at least some of the money stolen from Malaysia.

Sarawak Report is awaiting official comment on the news of the partial settlement from government sources in Malaysia.

Meanwhile, publishers have launched pre-sales for the upcoming book on China’s Belt & Road entanglement in Malaysia’s 1MDB cover up phase.  The China Contract, written by Sarawak Report editor Clare Rewcastle Brown and due for publication in October can be accessed from The Westbourne Press and will be available through Amazon.

It has taken 8 long years of legal pushback by Goldman Sachs for the bank to finally settle with shareholders for the damage done to them by its crooked dealings over 1MDB.  Late April it was reported an accommodation has been reached which will be submitted on 20th of this month.

There is no detail being given as to the size of the compensation to the plaintiffs who were led in the action by a Swedish pension fund, Sjunde AP-Fonden, (many of whose investors will not have lived to see this tardy acknowledgement of responsibility).

What is clear is that the top tier of the bank, who all received record bonuses from the outrageously overpriced 1MDB bond offerings (which acted as a front for the theft of billions), will have remained financially untouched. Many of those executives had been criminally indicted by Malaysia before the charges were bought off by a relatively meagre $2.5 billion snap settlement with the Muhyiddin government, over which many questions still linger.

Sarawak Report first reported exclusive details of the shareholder complaint in 2019, which gave an extraordinary insight into how those at the top, in the Management Committee of the bank, brushed aside compliance concerns and ignored not only the glaring red flags around Jho Low and the ‘guarantors’ at Abu Dhabi’s IPIC/Aabar fund, but the trenchant warnings of their more honest leading figures in Asia.

In particular, David Ryan, President of Goldman Asia, had warned in advance against the second bond issue crafted by the ambitious new Head of Southeast Asia for the bank, Tim Leissner, that there was no commercial justification put forward for the borrowing and that the power purchase plans being touted could easily have been funded by the proceeds of the earlier bond issue, which did not appear to have been spent.

He was not to know, unlike Leissener who was directly involved in the conspiracy, that this money had long since been stolen, but plainly he suspected it and cautioned those at the top of the bank against the lucrative proposals.  However, it was Leissner who was lionised by his bosses for the record profits being made out of their brand new stamping ground of Malaysia and Ryan, his senior, who was forced out of the bank.

Alex Turnbull, son of the previous Australian prime minister who also spoke out about the dodgy set up, was likewise squeezed out of Goldman Sachs. This was all during the period post-2008 and the global financial crash for which Goldman was largely responsible, after which it was supposed to have implemented far reaching compliance reforms.

The lawyers for the shareholders laid out a devastating litany of irresponsible tactics in Goldman’s new stamping ground, namely ’emerging markets’.  By the time the bank got stuck into its new Malaysia initiative (gaining its license from a grateful Najib in November 2009 after the bank had advised Jho Low behind the scenes on setting up 1MDB and its initial bonds) Goldman had already created outrage and provoked an angry lawsuit over its deception of the Libyan Investment Authority from which the bank had also walked away with a fortune.

It was the same Andrea Vella responsible for that scandal who then acted as Leissner’s line manager, protector and confidant over 1MDB.  He and expensive lawyers would succeed in persuading a London judge (but few others) of his innocence in the Libyan affair and was only finally ‘let go’ by Goldman Sachs in 2020 having been banned from banking by the Federal Reserve in the light of his 1MDB record.

The shareholder plaintiffs rightly pointed to this toxic cocktail of a red flagged non-transparent bond issue, guided through by a banker whose record was being challenged by another emerging country’s sovereign fund on behalf of a second such fund plainly advised by a known fraudster. Yet Goldman had stayed in the deal and taken the record cut of 11% for underwriting those bonds.

The penalties eventually heaped on the bank were foreseeable owing to such negligence, fraud and greed, said the shareholders. New post-transaction monitoring rules which the President of the bank, Gary Cohn had assured them were being implemented, should have alerted the bank exactly where the bond money had gone, namely into a set of fraudulent off-shore mirror companies set up by the conspirators at 1MDB and Aabar.

The bankers at Goldman’s New York HQ, including then CEO Lloyd Blankfein, who met with Najib and then Jho Low at least three times, clearly decided to engage in this lucrative purloining of Malaysia’s public money on a crooked calculation that the Malaysian prime minister had such a grip on his country that the billions stolen could be massaged away through a planned ‘floatation’ of 1MDB’s valueless shares which Najib would ensure would be bought up by pension funds and other public savings bodies.

His successor David Soloman partied at the Hamptons on the proceeds of the money stolen from the pensions of humble Malaysian public servants and others after fixing the cheap settlement with the Muhyiddin government.

The only reason Goldman have now finally settled with shareholders also, having tried every legal manoeuvre to deter the plaintiffs, is because they could not afford to have the appalling allegations laid out in this indictment aired in court in a case they would likely lose.

Read about the contents of the case the bank had to run away from in the original Sarawak Report articles based on the case filed in 2019.

https://sarawakreport.org/2019/11/goldman-sachs-lied-and-denied-over-1mdbs-billion-dollar-thefts/

https://www.sarawakreport.org/2019/11/devastating-indictment-by-goldman-shareholders-raises-pressure-on-top-dogs-at-worlds-most-powerful-bank-exclusive-report/

Update: May 21st it was announced Goldman Sachs had agreed to pay $500 million to settle the class action lawsuit

Late on Wednesday night KL time the Editor of Sarawak Report received a series of peculiar WhatsApp text messages on her personal phone.

They purported to be from Bukit Aman Police Station requiring her attendance at the Terengganu Magistrates Court in five days time, Monday 27th April, as the defendant in trial against her.  Had her lawyer informed her the police officer asked?

The answer was that the lawyer had themselves not been informed, therefore no.

Just last December the Malaysian High Court set aside a bizarre two year jail sentence issued out of the same Magistrate’s Court for what it judged was criminal defamation of the local Sultanah. This appears to be related to the same matter.

The ‘crime’ was to have in 2018 referred to the wife of the Sultan, as opposed to the sister of the Sultan, as having provided an introduction for the financial advisor Jho Low to the newly formed Terengganu Investment Authority.

Sarawak Report issued an apology and immediate correction, but was not able to fulfil a demand to pay RM300 million in compensation or purchase front page apologies in every publication in Malaysia.

The original criminal complaint had been set aside by prosecutors in 2018 but was revived behind the scenes (and without informing the defendant) in 2022/23, resulting in an unannounced trial in late December 2023 where the two year sentence was issued.

This process took place alongside aggressive civil litigation, whereby an initial High Court decision that Sarawak Report was innocent of defamation was appealed by the Sultanah’s lawyers and  overturned by the Appeal Court, citing some ground breaking theories in the realm of defamation law.

Sarawak Report financed the costs of that decision, thereby protecting local businesses who had been caught up in the suit under Malaysia’s draconian and outdated printing and publication laws.

It seems the Sultanah wants the editor of Sarawak Report behind bars in her local jailhouse as well, no matter the evident embarrassment this case represents to her relative who performed the introduction.

Sarawak Report had taken care in its publication at the time not to enter further into the business relationships between members of the Terengganu household and Jho Low nor to suggest any complicity in the financier’s later fraudulent dealings.

Indeed, the book praised the royal family for promptly stepping back when Jho Low’s ulterior motives and self-dealing became evident. Other publications have since cited the business ties in greater detail but were not pursued.

In its December ruling the High Court pointed to the fundamental abuses of due process under Malaysian law, resulting in what it judged to be a mistrial by the Terengganu Magistrate’s Court. This included the failure to press charges in person, the holding of a trial in absentia and indeed the total failure to notify Sarawak Report‘s editor and her lawyers that the trial was taking place.

The judge ruled that the prosecution should either be conducted again in the proper manner or the case should be dropped entirely.  Given the highly untoward manner in which a case that had been filed for No Action by prosecutors in 2018 was revived four years later, Sarawak Report was led to understand by the AGC that this should be the end of the affair.  Apparently this logic has been overruled.

The ‘notification’ by text appears to be an attempt to nod in the direction of the correct due processes demanded by the judge.  Perhaps the prosecution will argue to the Magistrate that on this occasion the defendant has at least been given 5 days notice of the trial and presumably the opportunity to hop on an expensive flight to Kl at short notice (warfare permitting) in order to be arrested, charged and prosecuted, albeit without time for a defence to be devised.

Sarawak Report would be surprised to find a single KL lawyer who would acknowledge this to be a fulfilment of the legal and diplomatic processes required to try the author of a foreign publication in a local Malaysian magistrate’s court. The rules are there in the penal code and the High Court spelt them out in December.

Sarawak Report therefore texted back to the Bukit Aman police officer:

“My lawyer has not been informed of any of this. You ought to have gone through the proper channels but seem to be repeating the same behaviour as before in a manner that was set aside by the court owing to the violations of due process. Please could you approach me through the correct diplomatic and legal channels and stop sending me these strange last minute personal texts. I am on the other side of the world, I have engagements all next week (including a talk I will be delivering at the UK Foreign Office where I will most certainly raise this latest extraordinary development) and I have no plans to visit Malaysia where I have no business or any other ties. What you accuse me of is not a crime in either my country or very many others. My book was published in the UK and I have never set foot in Terengganu. My lawyer is [NAME], as you should know since he got the last Magistrate ruling thrown out for being conducted on these exact same lines.”

The (senior) police officer responded “Ok Madam. Understood. Thanks.”  

Sarawak Report‘s lawyer has yet to receive any information or validation that this proposed if highly untoward trial will be going ahead as indicated by the series of personal texts, which the editor can confirm comes from a genuine number.

It is notable that whilst the authorities in Malaysia continue to successfully retrieve billions of stolen dollars as a result of Sarawak Report‘s exposure of Jho Low and the former prime minister Najib Razak, the sole acknowledgement or reward received for that dangerous service from successive governments has been a series of INTERPOL Red Notices, prosecutions, fines and now this second attempt at issuing a jail sentence.

Mysteriously, on the other hand, Malaysia has dropped its Red Notice against the perpetrator of those actual grand crimes and thefts, Jho Low himself who now resides in China.

It is not often the CEO of a major public owned company acts as a whistleblower, alleging the massaging of accounts to the tune of hundreds of millions of pounds (RM1.7bn).

Don O’Sullivan had been offered the chance to quietly walk away instead with a very nice settlement comprising 6 months payment of his half million pound annual salary. Why did he stand his ground?

O’Sullivan’s complexion changes colour “I had to do the right thing”, he says, “These were public companies with ordinary shareholders and pension funds which had invested huge sums and were being misled”.

These stakeholders had been led to believe by the company accounts that they were investing in a viable concern when the reality was that the Battersea Power Station project was losing money, which needed tackling head on, he goes on to explain. In other words, once again the Malaysian public and Malaysian government run funds are allegedly haemorrhaging cash, thanks to dubious investments backed by former prime minister Najib Razak.

Najib’s Signature White Elephant Project

The 42 acre Battersea Power Station site had long been considered a notorious White Elephant project, requiring huge investments but boasting a potentially prestige outcome with eventual profits. It had changed hands a number of times as developers pulled out before a Malaysian consortium of largely public owned institutions took over in 2012, making a massive and welcome investment in the UK capital’s most troublesome development.

The £400m purchase was through a consortium consisting of SP Setia (40%) and Sime Darby Properties (40%).  Both companies are listed on the KL stock exchange and are largely owned by the Malaysian government controlled investment fund PNB and the government pension fund EPF. The remaining 20% of the company Battersea Power Station Development Company (BPSDC) is directly owned by EPF (Malaysia’s public workers pension fund).

BPSDC itself only has a net value of £1.7 million in its published accounts as it is structured as a subsidiary of a conveniently opaque offshore holding company, BPS Holdings, a Jersey-registered entity owned by the same parties.

By 2018 it had become apparent, however, that the Malaysian consortium was running out of cash and into trouble. In January that year the two public Malaysian funds which already owned the lion’s share of the consortium plunged a staggering £1.6 billion into effectively buying out part of their own project – it was the biggest UK property sale on record and the money invested was earmarked to cover the remaining exponential development costs needed to raise profits.

At the time and over the ensuing years Sarawak Report predicted a possible disaster waiting to happen. The deal held dangerous signs of being a vanity project by the man at the top in Malaysia whose intervention was clearly needed to sign it off, namely the Minister of Finance who ultimately controlled the two funds and also happened to be the Prime Minister, Najib Razak.

Najib had been ingratiated by the UK prime minister, David Cameron, the then London mayor Boris Johnson, and the self-proclaimed dealmaker Lord Jonathan Marland (the UK prime minister’s then trade envoy), who all turned up for photo-ops with the Malaysian PM as he turned the earth on the site in 2012.

Marland called the deal his proudest achievement and would later take a directorship at the Eco-world group run by the former CEO of SP Setia which was developing adjacent sites. The businessman lord gravitated to the role of trusted PR advisor to Najib, burnishing his image after the 1MDB scandal hit and helping in election campaign work. Marland’s Commonwealth branded business venture, the so-called Commonwealth Enterprise and Investment Council, counted Malaysia as a ‘strategic partner’.

Another official caught up in smoothing the deal was the Mayor’s key officer Edward Lister (former chair of the local Wandsworth Council) who was later forced to resign a directorship he also took at Eco World following exposure by Sarawak Report. He sought to return to the role during his period working as a special advisor to Johnson whilst prime minister, but was ruled against by the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments which judged he should not do so until 6 months after leaving his post (which he did on the day the 6 months expired).

In January 2018 with a crisis election looming in the wake of the 1MDB scandal, the last thing Najib had needed was the collapse of the project he had already invested Malaysia’s public and pension money into, along with his own credibility to boot. Hence the massive £1.6 bn shot in the arm for the Battersea development which has become a great success for Londoners in terms of the core building having now been transformed into a vibrant and popular shopping, commercial and residential property area with almost half the 42 acres still remaining to be developed.

However, Najib lost the election and the massive funding duly turned out to be still inadequate to cover the exponential costs of transforming an iconic but troublesome landmark structure. Reports make clear that in an adverse post-Covid economy the costs of the development have spiralled with specialists highlighting the difficulties in making commercial returns on large buildings in the present market.

‘Clean Up’

Don O’Sullivan took on the job of CEO of Battersea Power Station Development Company (BPSDC) in June 2024 after a decades long career at the high profile private developer Galliard Homes, where he was Chief Executive for five years. He replaced a predecessor who had been in the job at Battersea since 2008 navigating over a decade of re-financing crises and new ownerships.

“At Galliard I was used to rigorous corporate governance as we conducted numerous joint ventures which demand the highest standards of compliance and due diligence”, he says “I assumed in joining a public owned company that the corporate governance would be at least equal to that standard, with additional obligations because of public ownership”. He acknowledges a level of naivety having now scrutinised Malaysia’s record on joint ventures and public investments, particularly under Najib.

The two Chief Executives of the key shareholder companies SP Setia and Sime Darby Properties were both on the board of the Battersea development company (as was he) and also its parent Battersea Project holding company BPS. A newly appointed Chairman of the Board of the Jersey holding company, Shahril Ridza Ridzuan, had close ties to PNB.

In September, O’Sullivan was tasked by a meeting of the development company board to find a way to recover the £1.4 billion in equity so far invested in the business and later, as part of the exercise, to draw up a ‘Strategy Paper’ for the future phases of the project where there were still 19 remaining acres of purchased land to build on.

As a result, he did a deep dive review of the state of the development and its accounts. He claims  the plan of approach he presented to the two CEO’s of SP Setia and Sime Darby Properties was considerably more detailed than previous overviews as commented on by the latter, Azmir Merican. However, his research did not result in a happy outcome.

The first thing O’Sullivan says he noticed was that two separate market valuations commissioned by BPSHC with regard to the five remaining undeveloped phases on the site (bought for £150m in 2012) only calculated their current worth at a total of £647 million.  Yet the company accounts had them valued at £965 million, a whopping £318M more than the independent valuations.

BPS have subsequently argued they use a different method of valuation, saying this higher figure was representative of the amount of investment that had been injected indirectly into the sites on top of the original land purchase cost, for example simply managing the ownership in advance of any construction or investing in relevant infrastructure (such as the Northern Line); value that could expect to be realised once the projects were for sale. Except, says O’Sullivan, the evidence shows that level of investment (£815 million) had not been made on those remaining phases.

“As an example of the misreporting”, he explains, “for Phase 3C in the Statutory Accounts for y/e 31 December 2023 they showed £220M of ‘inventories’ – this term means that the value of completed (and/or part built) apartments at that time was £220M. But Phase 3C did not even get planning permission until April 2025 and as at today’s date no construction has yet been started on Phase 3C, there are even today no completed or part built apartments on Phase 3C.”

For this reason, he points out, the independent valuation provided by Jones Lang LaSalle for Phase 3C at that time only valued 3C at £100M (£120 million shortfall on this phase alone).

It got worse: for Phase 7, O’Sullivan notes, there was no independent valuation – because it was no longer owned by Battersea Power Station, having been sold in 2014. Yet in Q4 2024 it remained on the BPS books at an asset value of £53M, up from the £44M asset value in those same statutory accounts from 31 December 2023.

O’Sullivan concluded from the accounts, backed he says by confirmation he received from a company financial executive (who he says admitted he had been “uncomfortable” and “pressured” to put through the figures) that over successive years BPHoldCo had been shunting running costs of the company into the alleged investment costs associated with developing those future sites (a so-called capitalisation of costs).

A minimum £318 had thus been repackaged, concluded O’Sullivan, as if they were costs invested in building on sites that had not yet started to be developed, with the effect of disguising heavy ongoing losses on the existing built project which, if known about, could have severely jeopardised the value and viability of the company (and incidentally, he claims, the bonus arrangements for top execs).

PWC London, on behalf of PWC Malaysia, had nonetheless signed off on these ‘massaged’ accounts without any reference to the independent valuations, neither was there evidence the company had interrogated the detailed figures which conflicted with the statutory accounts, says O’Sullivan.

O’Sullivan says he was very worried by the disparities and misreporting and drew up a presentation stating the stark financial situation. As he would report to the UK Employment Tribunal last month this was “made in the public interest” because “the BPS development was a public project, ultimately owned and run for the benefit of stakeholders in pension funds and public companies in Malaysia”.

However, when he presented his findings in good faith at meetings in early November to managers and then in more detail to the CEO’s of Sime Darby Properties and SP Setia, Azmir Merican and Choong Kai Wai, he says he was shocked by the angry and critical response. Rather than address his concerns, he says, they attacked side issues and an alleged lack of ‘strategic vision’ on his part.

At that point, he claims, he realised he was not telling these executives anything they did not already know about the state of the accounts. At a follow-up meeting one accused him of “being in the 80s” according to his complaint.

The company have presented a different version of events, saying the criticism owed not to O’Sullivan’s questioning of the finances but rather because his work so far on the proposed Strategy Paper “was a disaster” and not what the company had expected (having taken just over a month to produce rather than a far shorter expected time): his presentation “did not present any clear strategic direction for the business and the Claimant’s performance in this [Nov 8] meeting was embarrassingly poor”.

Backlash

O’Sullivan dates any problems he had with the company from that meeting, saying he had received zero negative feedback before that point but that going forward he experienced immediate  accusations, first over performance and an alleged poor relationship with colleagues and then of misconduct.

The day following the third discussion, 14th November 2024, BPSDC’s  Human Resources Director, Donna Lythaby, was informed by the two Malaysian directors that O’Sullivan’s plans to hire new staff should be frozen. At a Teams meeting about this in the afternoon Azmir Merican allegedly accused O’Sullivan of ‘lying’ and not being up to the job. A deputy to Azmir Merican then contacted Don O’Sullivan to say that he would be flying over from Malaysia to discuss matters in ten days time.

The tension could not have arisen at a more delicate time given O’Sullivan had been assigned a leading and responsible role in the upcoming royal visit to the newly completed power station core shopping complex by King Charles on December 12th. He would continue to perform those duties.

Yet, at their meeting in the run up to that event, towards the end of November, Azmir Merican’s envoy told him that the two CEOs of SP Setia and Sime Darby Propertis now considered they ‘had a problem’ with their relationship with O’Sullivan. Likewise, they alleged O’Sullivan had ‘problems’ with his senior team(O’Sullivan says he enquired later of his senior staff who told him they had no issues).

The envoy said that if O’Sullivan tried speaking with Choong and Azmir it would make it worse. In their joint tribunal statement the CEOs claim they had by then identified him as “unable .. to demonstrate any real insight into what was required of him as CEO” and as “losing the confidence of the dressing room” with staff.  It is admitted management had provided no specifics to back such concerns at the time.

The two CEOs officially recommended O’Sullivan be sacked on 28th November, just after that meeting, and claim that before this date O’Sullivan had not raised formal whistleblowing issues. A letter drafted by managers acknowledged the “timing is deeply unfortunate” but insisted the disciplinary complaints were “not linked” to him raising concerns about the accounts (it was eventually decided not to send this letter).

To the contrary, the company alleges that it was only after O’Sullivan learned of plans to remove him that he cooked up his whistleblowing complaint based on an “inadequate understanding of the financials of the business“.  His only motive, say his former Malaysian employers was “to improve his personal position when facing dismissal for poor performance”: it was not a matter of public interest.

Whistleblowing Complaint or False Allegation?

Clearly under attack, O’Sullivan decided to inform the new Chairman of the Jersey holding company (where the accounts were lodged away from public scrutiny), Shahril Ridza Ridzuan, emailing him on December 2nd. O’Sullivan’s email began “I am acutely aware of the seriousness of this message, and I am equally conscious of obligations and fiduciary duties I hold as a director of BPS entities”, before he confided his “profound and serious concerns regarding financial reporting issues at BPS”.

He forwarded a copy of that email to the Head of Human Resources, Donna Lythaby, who responded by acknowledging a whistleblower complaint had been made and sending him a copy of the company policy on whistleblowing.

Copies of communications with O’Sullivan indicate that Shahril was responsive and showed concern on behalf of the main shareholders at PNB that these issues should be addressed.  He said he would seek to work behind the scenes to help the CEO deal with problems in the accounts.

After a discussion on the morning of the royal visit, which he had arrived from KL to attend, Shahril  agreed to raise the matters at a BPS Holding Company board meeting just before Christmas on December 16th.

Sarawak Report has obtained a recording of the relevant segment of the meeting and a transcript.

This evidence shows that Ridzuan raised O’Sullivan’s concerns as a genuine problem acknowledging operating losses had been presented as investment costs (‘capitalisation of expenditure/sunk costs’) in the future sites. He told directors “the biggest structural problem really is your inflated sunk costs, what are you going to do with that? Because you are going to get hit by that at some point”.

Likewise, the two company CEOs, Azmir Merican and Choong Kai Wai, who had responded so angrily to O’Sullivan’s earlier warnings in November, did not appear to deny the allegation they just questioned how best to “clean up” the accounts.

“We need a tactical plan for when is the right time when we clean this up a little bit, whether it is one time or two time, we have to discuss bit maybe in strategy”, Sime Darby Properties CEO, Azmir Merican, replied.

The Chairman pushed back to reiterate “the two fundamental problems we have here, which are essentially the debt and your overinflated carrying costs sunk costs… you really need to look at this right, the first step to me is to stop capitalisation, because you are just prolonging the problem, you are not solving it.”

The CFO of the BPS Development Company chipped in “If you look at it, the sunk costs is substantially all the operating costs have been capitalised, from day one. So if you didn’t capitalise from day one then we won’t be having this conversation!” (A seeming admission the true picture on the balance sheet was deliberately being hidden as investment costs in future income generating projects).

SP Setia CEO, Choong Kai Wai had his own solution “In 2027, if all goes well in asset management, we have got a £200M upside”, to which Sime Darby Properties CEO, Azmir Merican, added “We could take a hit then, that’s the thinking”.
(See Excerpt Below)

This Teams recording in which directors and managers admitted the substance of O’Sullivan’s concerns, also that  the problematic accounting had knowingly been practiced by the company, was swiftly removed after being uploaded says O’Sullivan. He later disclosed he had recorded the earlier November meetings where he had raised the same issues, which he believes counters those claims he had only raised the matter after the call for his dismissal.

Yet, if O’Sullivan came away from the meeting believing he now had the authority to take on the problem and sort it out, he soon learned he was mistaken. According to messages he exchanged with the Chairman during Shahril’s flight back to Malaysia the following day, the two CEO’s had just called him say things were ‘not working out’ and then suspended him:

O’Sullivan – “I guess you are mid flight enroute home to KL right now. Dato Azmir and Datuk Choong had a meeting with me from about 9.40 this morning. They’ve told me it hasn’t worked out and I should go home immediately and talk to them tomorrow morning they want to do a settlement exit agreement with me. There was a piece in the conversation about the sunk costs and their burden on future phases, there was a piece where I asked to bring [XXX] in and [XXX] gave a different answer on inventories than that he gave me last week. He is scared of losing his job. [Choong] and [Azmir] were very anxious about my challenges with the numbers. Can we speak at the soonest opportunity pls – I have left the office as instructed.”
Chairman – “Any specific reasons for it not working out? I guess they’ve been messaging this to you for a couple weeks now”
O’Sullivan – “No. Nothing specific. Generalities around it not working with the Team. But when asked they had no examples. The only examples I had been given previously by [Azmir’s envoy] was that my behaviour was unbecoming of the position of CEO of BPS – the specific examples
1. Learning names of people in junior roles on the estate – it was wrong that I spoke to cleaners, security guards and concierge member by their first names
2. The photograph on Linkedin of me hugging the Peppa Pig character when the new Peppa Pig shop opening at BPS was being marketed. No other examples. This all started from the issuing of the sunk costs table showing the £318M gap between the asset valuations on our books and the actual independent asset valuations. Choong said to me that ‘a little knowledge in accounting can be v dangerous thing’.”

Following the interchange O’Sullivan decided to fight, he says, and by this stage he was concerned that the misleading figures possibly owed to deliberate fraud. He therefore took the step of emailing the company’s legal department on December 21st under the subject heading False Accounting. The email explained: “At the Board Meeting on Monday 16^th December, Tan Sri Shahril raised questions regarding historic sunk costs, from the discussion and statements that followed from Dato Azmir, Datuk Choong and Tan Sri Jagan and others, it was acknowledged that something in excess of £200M of costs have been transferred to future phases, to reduce the reporting of losses in earlier phases at BPS.” 

Therefore, O’Sullivan requested the department to “appoint an independent law firm, appropriately experienced in matters relating to fraudulent accounting, to lead an investigation within BPSDC, including questioning staff and directors.”  O’Sullivan ended with a reminder that “Deliberate miss reporting in statutory accounts is a serious criminal offence.”

The new CEO had thrown down the gauntlet; however he had done so via an internal process and, avowedly, in the interests of the company and its shareholders (not, he says, in response to complaints about his performance and the settlement offer to leave).

Yet, rather than BPSHold Co engaging in the process and collaborating to review O’Sullivan’s concerns, he says he found himself the target of an increasingly ruthless campaign to shut him up and get him out of the company, combined with an organised rebuttal of his whistleblowing complaint and criticism of the accounts.

Two days after the meeting, 18 December 2024, BPS emailed to inform O’Sullivan not to return to the office saying the company was prepared to offer him a without prejudice settlement deal including a six months severance offer tied to a 19 page non-disclosure agreement. There were no reasons given, save for the previous verbal allegations that there were ‘relationship problems’ with the Sime Darby Property and SP Setia CEOs and senior staff.

O’Sullivan this time called the Chairman stating “They just want to kick me out because they know I’m not going to sign their fake or any fake or false accounts for them. And I’m not going to lie for them”.   

That interchange (also recorded) proves Shahril continued to be supportive, acknowledging problems with the accounts whilst warily indicating that the matter of intent was yet to be determined.

He told O’Sullivan he had relayed the concerns back to the major shareholders: “I think the PNB side is now fully aware of, what I’ve told them basically is that from my look at it, there is at least £220M of opex [operating expenses] costs right that have been put through to the capex [capital expenditure] which would need to be taken out in order for the project to move forward. So what they’ve asked me basically let’s verify the number which is what we said at the Board Meeting yesterday, right let’s verify the number then that’s actually then figure out what is that number that we’re talking about….. I mean the rest you can argue, whether it’s consultancy costs towards site wide or costs across the whole development right”.

O’Sullivan had pushed back. “Well they can’t argue the £53M on Phase 7”, to which the Chairman had reminded that £22 million could have been double counted before acknowledging “Yea so £220M plus £33M”.

Shahril continued “there was no dispute around the table [at the board meeting] when I said the sunk costs were too high for the project to proceed sensibly… I think [it’s] the first time it’s probably been properly acknowledged that the issue can’t carry on….I think I have support from [Sime Darby & SP Setia’s] CFOs and the other board members to push on this. I don’t think they’ve been comfortable for a while and just needed someone to step in who has an equally strong voice.”

Despite the nods from the top, the process to remove O’Sullivan continued. That same day, he says, BPS hired a hard-hitting US legal firm, Brown Rudnick, which would draw up a disciplinary case against him and oversee the process by which the company dismissed his whistleblowing complaint. This included the commissioning of a further accountancy report to rebut O’Sullivan’s figures, (which by then had been supported by forensic accountants, Moore Kingston Smith, who had concurred that a minimum of £318 million (RM1.7 bn) was misreported).

On 19th December O’Sullivan emailed Donna Lythaby saying he feared the company “may be about to assert entirely trumped-up charges because I raised a serious whistleblowing complaint”. It seems no coincidence that the day after that, 20th December, the aide to Azmir Merican also emailed Lythaby from KL requesting a copy of the company’s disciplinary policy.

The process was clearly extremely painful for Don O’Sullivan. Having initiated disciplinary proceedings without adequately explaining the nature of the complaints against him, BPS instructed him immediately before Christmas that he was suspended from work and should not return to the office. This was in response to his refusal to accept the settlement offer.

After several weeks with no feedback O’Sullivan was called to a ‘disciplinary investigation’ meeting conducted by a barrister, who he claims was also commissioned by Brown Rudnick, to judge the allegations against him. “The Barrister met me once, they did not provide me with any evidence of anything prior to, or during that investigation meeting. I offered witnesses to speak on my behalf, he refused to meet them or even make contact. A Brown Rudnick solicitor did the note taking with him for his interviews on the ‘investigation'”, complains O’Sullivan.

Accusations of ‘unbecoming behaviour’, he says were belatedly presented to his lawyers before a hearing where a senior executive read a pre-prepared statement and refused to ask or reply to questions. These accusations included O’Sullivan’s aforementioned willingness to engage with junior employees on a first name basis and hugging Pepper Pig.

Other charges, which he calls ‘trumped up’, were accusations he disparaged two female executives and had a “brusque and at times intemperate manner, veering into aggression if angry”. O’Sullivan maintains numerous female members of staff refused to endorse these claims when asked to do so and maintains there is no formal record of any complaint having been made against him prior to his November alert on the financial situation.

The company has since responded that “such complaints were made in an informal manner, and orally by telephone call, rather than formally and in writing”, however that this “did not detract from the fact that members of the Senior Leadership Team had been complaining about the Claimant, albeit in an informal manner”.

The KC’s report duly upheld that “a number of the allegations were substantiated, including some of very high seriousness”, based on the complaints provided by BPS.  The KC also dismissed O’Sullivan’s claim to have suffered detriment as a result of whistleblowing, agreeing there was evidence “from October, and perhaps even earlier” of  “serious dissatisfaction with his performance, his failure to foster effective working relationships with many members of his [team], and his failure to lead on and effectively deliver an acceptable strategic vision for the company”. 

In fact, the KC concluded, it looked more likely “the matter was the other way around” and that O’Sullivan had cooked up the allegations after learning he would be fired in late November. In a statement to Sarawak Report by Brown Rudnick the company confirmed this charge saying BPSD  “in its defence said O’Sullivan had realised he was likely to be fired and made a series of allegations to “improve his personal position when facing dismissal for poor performance”.

In May 2025 the outcome of the disciplinary process and ensuing appeal was a ruling that O’Sullivan be dismissed for ‘Gross Misconduct” without compensation.

A ‘Commercial Challenge’ not Dishonest Accounting

Meanwhile, O’Sullivan claims that the accountancy firm Evelyn & Partners, which was engaged to provide an independent assessment of the company figures in response to his whistleblowing complaint, had admitted they too were taking instructions from Brown Rudnick, the law firm hired to conduct the disciplinary process against him.

Sarawak Report approached Brown Rudnick for comment on its role. In response the law firm said “if the allegation is that the Evelyn Partners LLP and S&W and the KC’s investigations and reports were not independent … that would be a serious allegation impugning the honesty and integrity of external, independent professionals (who carried out their own independent investigations to determine the facts before providing their independent professional opinions and reports) and one which is contradicted by the contemporaneous documents”. The firm said it was unable to confirm whether the professionals received instructions through Brown Rudnick without understanding the scope of the allegation being made.

The accountancy report issued a robust and comprehensive denial that the concerns raised by O’Sullivan amounted to accounting irregularities. The same report disparaged the forensic accountants who had backed O’Sullivan’s conclusion that operating costs had been misplaced as capital investment (in order to disguise ongoing losses on the project) saying that, to the contrary, IFRS international reporting standards allow such displacements when developments are ongoing.

Specifically, the Evelyn & Partners rebuttal concludes that although 79% of the assigned capitalisation costs owed to staffing and related matters, with only the remaining attributable to actual infrastructure investments, such as the Northern Line (18%), these costs could be seen as having the ‘overarching objective of developing the site“, making it acceptable to categorise operational costs as capital costs.

Likewise, displacing costs to a site BPS didn’t own was acceptable since it had an option to buy the site and had set money aside in case it decided to take that up. “I can see no basis for suggesting that BPHCL’s decision to capitalise this expenditure amounted to “misreporting” the report stated.

To this BPS has added it its own claim that at the meetings where these issues were raised by O’Sullivan and acknowledged by executives “No one, including [O’Sullivan], made any reference to accounting or financial misreporting or to any potential illegality. Everyone, including [O’Sullivan], correctly identified this as a commercial challenge which required a commercial solution”.

Ultimately, since the company is based in Jersey, BPS has pointed out that it is conveniently not subject to UK rules in any case! The figures in question had been signed off by PWC London and O’Sullivan has told Sarawak Report the accounting firm recently opened its own investigation.

Employment Tribunal Complaint

If the Malaysian company thought disciplinary measures would get rid of the problematic CEO it had misjudged. Don O’Sullivan has brought a whistleblower’s complaint to the UK Employment Tribunal which  has already gained widespread media attention in the UK reflecting on the possible concerns regarding Battersea Power Station’s disputed accounts.

In response the companies have been vocal in the Malaysian media with various rebuttals. In separate statements issued to the Malaysian media last month the Employees Provident Fund (EPF) said there had been no allegations made by O’Sullivan against the accounts of BSPDC (indeed, the concerns are about the BPHolding Co accounts), whilst SP Setia Bhd claimed it has ‘not been party to the tribunal proceedings’.

BPS’s Human Resources head, Donna Lythaby, who according to the complaint filed by O’Sullivan was “excluded from the process on the instructions of [the two Malaysian CEO’s]” after initiating the whistleblowing complaint, was herself ‘let go’ by the company as well.

She has brought her own complaint to the same Tribunal, and in March posted a public LinkedIn comment praising O’Sullivan in marked contrast to the alleged ‘problems’ with the senior management team:
“It was a real honour to work with you Don. Your leadership inspired genuine excitement across the team, and people consistently spoke highly of your vision and integrity. Wishing you strength and continued success ahead.”

Sarawak Report reached out for comment from PNB, EPF, JS Setia and Sime Darby Properties, to which Brown Rudnick has issued a response on behalf of BPSD and BPS Holdings again saying:
“the accounting treatment used was appropriate with the third party valuations produced on a different basis than those used in BPS Holding’s audited accounts. PWC which audits BPS Holding has not been accused of any wrongdoing. BPS Holding which is not a party to the litigation has also denied any accounting irregularities.”

Days after O’Sullivan was excluded from the site, a visit in January last year by the new Malaysian prime minister, Anwar Ibrahim, was treated as a major endorsement of the project. Towards the end of the year rumours were even floated suggesting a major buyer had been circling seeking to snap up the successful project.

EPF, PNB and SP Setia were driven to issue a joint statement declaring they had no interest in relinquishing the profitable enterprise.

Such is the present slow pace of Britain’s judicial and regulatory processes, readers may be dismayed to learn that the rights or wrongs of this multi-billion ringgit case will not be heard until 2029.  Till then, the true financial situation facing BPHoldCo will remain disputed while bearing considerable financial implications for the Malaysian public funds invested in the project.

Don O’Sullivan claims up to half a billion pounds (RM2.6 bn) is a likely estimate for the as yet undeclared losses. If so, and if these cannot be recovered resulting in liquidations and forced sales, it will be the Malaysian public who will suffer once again.

The upside will be enjoyed by others far away. Malaysian pensions and public services will have ponied up for what has become a very nice shopping, residential and business centre for Londoners.

As reported in London’s Sunday Observer, it is now confirmed that the $1.83 billion legal suit initiated by 1MDB against the major transatlantic law firm White & Case, which acted for PetroSaudi in the fraudulent joint venture that cost Malaysian taxpayers billions of ringgit, has sparked both regulatory and criminal investigations in the UK.

Following revelations last week that the UK Solicitors Regulatory Authority is examining the actions of White & Case’s London Office, the Chief Commissioner of the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission (MACC), Azam Baki, released a statement confirming UK authorities have been engaged in a criminal investigation launched by the MACC into the firm following a mutual legal assistance request.

We can confirm that the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission (MACC) is currently undertaking investigations in relation to the law firm concerned. The scope of the investigation includes, among others, the preparation of documentation and payment instructions which are suspected to contain inaccuracies or to have been misleading, and which may have contributed to the misdirection of funds linked to 1MDB.
The investigation is also examining payments made to the firm that are believed to involve funds potentially connected to the alleged misappropriation of 1MDB assets……. In order to support and advance the investigation, MACC is in the process of seeking further information and documentation through formal channels, including via the Attorney General’s Chambers (AGC) and Mutual Legal Assistance (MLA) arrangements with the United Kingdom authorities…. cooperation and communication between the relevant agencies remain ongoing and constructive.”

Enquires by Sarawak Report have established that these ongoing investigations involve the UK’s International Anti Corruption Coordination Centre which comes under Britain’s National Crime Agency.

The NCA has said it does not comment on ongoing investigations and White & Case told journalists that it is not aware of criminal investigations in the UK.   However, that statement was followed by a further update from the MACC Chief Commissioner in which he said the agency has now completed its own investigations into the law firm “with a recommendation for charges to be filed against several individuals”.

Sarawak Report has established that at least one of those individuals is among those named in 1MDB’s civil suit currently lodged both against White & Case and Patrick Mahony, the PetroSaudi manager already convicted of fraud in Switzerland.

UK anti-corruption campaigners have told Sarawak Report that any engagement by the NCA would  represent a major development in tackling the country’s problem with so-called professional enablers of global corruption.

“This investigation is a significant step towards unprecedented scrutiny of the London lawyers whose services paved the way for corrupt elites to siphon off billions in public funds.
For far too long, major law firms caught up in global corruption scandals have escaped effective accountability for their role as witting or unwitting enablers of dirty money.
Any enforcement action against White & Case would send a shockwave through the legal profession and shatter the illusion of impunity that some law firms may be too big to be called to account by the regulator.”
[Dr Helen Taylor, Dep Director Spotlight on Corruption]

‘Professional Enablers’?

From the day Sarawak Report broke the story of 1MDB’s Heist of the Century, the role of White & Case, the lawyers for the fund’s ‘joint venture partner’, PetroSaudi, has featured at the forefront of much of the fraud uncovered.

Like the bankers Goldman Sachs, who have been fined billions for their enabling role, the prestige law firm provided the conspirators with an invaluable cover and patina of respectability, thereby assisting troublingly hasty and unusual  transactions to go ahead, despite the multiple red flags involved.

Testifying in court last year, 1MDB’s CEO described the false sense of security offered by the firm’s involvement as PetroSaudi’s legal advisors and Baker & MacKenzie (Wong & Partners) who represented 1MDB: “I was not suspicious at all of the name PetroSaudi Holdings (Cayman) Ltd that was different from the name PetroSaudi International Ltd as it was prepared by a 1MDB officer who was an expert with the help of famous lawyers”, he said of one such anomaly (Jho Low’s signature sleight was using similar names for connected off-shore companies but with completely different controlling entities to funnel cash).

Now, that Malaysia’s ability to take action and access necessary information has been revived (following years of powerful obstruction) efforts are at last being made to hold the law firm to account, not just for negligence and incompetence but for complicity. 1MDB’s staggering $1.83 billion legal suit against White & Case amounts to the entire sum 1MDB alleges the law firm ‘dishonestly assisted‘ its clients and their co-conspirators in stealing from the sovereign fund.

The case was lodged in KL at the end of 2024, following the conviction of the two prime movers at PetroSaudi itself, shareholder Tarek Obaid and director Patrick Mahony, by the Swiss Courts (the two men are appealing lengthy jail sentences).

White & Case immediately sought to get Malaysia’s case thrown out on the grounds of jurisdiction and delay, however those claims were dismissed by the KL High Court in December on the grounds that White & Cases’ clients, PetroSaudi, had submitted to Malaysian jurisdiction to do business with the sovereign fund and the delay was due to obstruction by fraudsters in high office.

An inevitable appeal against that ruling will be heard in May. Meanwhile, the details of the pleadings against the law firm allege shocking charges of “dishonest assistance” and “conspiracy to injure by unlawful means“, squarely based on the facts originally reported in this blog and the questions we have raised since 2015 about the firm’s baffling insouciance over the suspicious transactions they supported.

W&C Represented PetroSaudi ‘at all Material Times During Fraud’

The nub of 1MDB’s civil law suit is that not only had White & Case “wilfully and recklessly failed to make such inquiries as an honest and reasonable person would make” in their engagement with the initial joint venture deal with 1MDB, where the fund ploughed $1 billion into a worthless PetroSaudi subsidiary which White & Case helped to present as a major oil licensee, but that even after White & Case could hold no remaining doubts that the PetroSaudi vehicle was a fraud, the law firm continued to assist in the raising of a further $833 million in 1MDB loans against the non-existent value of that company.

In the initial joint venture PetroSaudi claimed to have injected a $2.7 billion asset into the shared company through a bogus oil extraction license in Turkmenistan when in fact it did not own the license and, besides, the license had no value in a disputed territory for the foreseeable future.

White & Case ought surely to have realised this at the time they injected the ‘asset’ into the joint venture, not least because it was registered with a Jersey Company that was publicly described as having zero value unless an option to buy into the target oil license was activated.

The same public company documents also pointed out that even if the asset was acquired it would be only worth a maximum of $500m and only after six years, not the value of $2.7 bn that PetroSaudi claimed.

How could lawyers managing the documentation have missed these openly declared facts, which Sarawak Report picked it up from an online enquiry, and why did White & Case not wait for an independent credible valuation to be obtained, which they did not, before signing off on the venture, as had been demanded by the 1MDB board as its prerequisite?

There was a further Argentinian ‘oil asset’ that was likewise injected into the joint venture company by PetroSaudi, which White & Case plainly did know was worthless. In an email to their colleagues a week before the JV was signed a White & Case lawyer specifically described the Argentinian company as having a “disposal value [of] almost nil” for tax purposes.

Yet, the Joint Venture Agreement signed on 28th September 2009 endorsed the value of the joint venture company, set up under the auspices of White & Case, at $2.7 billion based on the portfolio of these two oil assets.

If White & Case were missing red flags others, meanwhile, did not. Another big name, the auditors PWC, had been approached to provide the required independent valuation for the company to be produced before this completion date but refused on the grounds there was not enough time (less than a week) to do an acceptable job.

PetroSaudi would use “another competent authority as PWC is being too slow” Mahony had told the venture’s original BSI bankers who had warned on September 24th that their compliance department had insisted “Valorization of Argentinean and Turkmenistan’s Assets : very important to get please”. White & Case exhibited no such concerns and continued to vouch for their client.

Mahony fell back on a friendly contact, the US banker, Ed Morse, whom he hired for $100,000 to do the lightening valuation job on the basis only of information provided by PetroSaudi and without a site visit: “We are looking for a mid-range of $2.5b” explained Mahony in an email.  “OK got it!” responded Morse and added a disclaimer to his one-sided valuation to that effect (he in fact came in at $2.9 billion plus).

Despite this dubious process, the Malaysian suit complains, White & Case, although aware of the requirement for a full independent valuation, nonetheless endorsed the document. Indeed, the valuation was not even delivered by Morse until the 29th September, the day after the Joint Venture was executed on the understanding that the assets were worth at least $2,7 billion.

There is no question that White & Case knew the valuation had not been received, let alone vetted, as their legal team were still asking PetroSaudi for it on 29th September in order to send it on to 1MDB. It arrived that evening. If they had read the valuation document the lawyers would have noted Ed Morse’s disclaimer and the obvious fact that the valuation was neither independent nor verified. Yet, they raised no concerns about continuing with the process of sending demands for payment the following day, 30th September.

It was not just PWC who were too uneasy to go ahead. BSI Bank also pulled out of opening accounts for the joint venture and the PetroSaudi holding company just a couple of days after pressing for the valuation details on September 28th. It seems Mahony had spooked them during the same email exchange by describing the planned diversion of $700 million dollars PetroSaudi from 1MDB’s investment as a “premium” (commission) that the fund had agreed to pay.

A compliance officer from Geneva’s BSI branch wrote at the time “I don’t like the transaction at all! In particular the role and involvement of Mr Low Taek Jho ‘looks and feels’ very subspicious [sic] to me.” [DOJ Complaint]. 

Jho Low had no official status in the transaction as the bank had ascertained. Indeed, several messages from the fraudster sought to remind the officials at 1MDB and PetroSaudi to keep his name out of official communications and that emails should not be openly copied to him. Sarawak Report has evidence that White & Case lawyers were nonetheless aware of Jho Low’s involvement by this stage, yet appear not to have shared the same concerns.

Jho was present at their London offices (albeit in a separate room) during the key negotiations between PetroSaudi and 1MDB’s top management and legal team on 23rd September. Brian Chia of Wong & Partners has testified he was introduced to him on that occasion by 1MDB’s CEO as Najib’s unofficial advisor.

Emails from Patrick Mahony to the White & Case team confirm the law firm was likewise in the loop. Given the orders by Jho, these mentions were a slip up but they reveal the W&C lawyers knew who Jho and his lawyer Tiffany Heah were. For example, the day following the negotiations Mahony emailed White & Case to gain their consent for Jho’s lawyer, Tiffany Heah to be allowed back into their London offices to look over the resulting documents before they were sent to be signed by Najib.

“Gentlemen – it is becoming quite important that we sign all of the docs and finalise the new structure by end of day tomorrow… Jho has just called and asked that tiffany do a minimum of dd [legal due diligence] on the new structure by at least seeing all of the signed docs (1.5b shares issued, 700m loan, that 1mdb owns PSI cayco). Is this achievable? Can we have all of the docs ready tomorrow for tarek to sign and then she can come and seen them all signed at some point in the afternoon? I have no issues doing this and in fact like it.” [email from Patrick Mahony to White & Case 24th Sept 2009]

The smoking gun email confirms the White & Case legal team knew who Jho and lawyer Tiffany were (indeed had met them the day before in their offices) and understood their role as supervisors of the deal on behalf of Najib.

It is notable that 1MDB’s own lawyers, Wong & Partners (a subsidiary of Baker & McKenzie against whom proceedings have now been dropped by 1MDB) had itself issued a rare Memorandum of Concern to warn the Board just before the joint venture was signed, on 26th September after Brian Chia arrived back from London.

The worries expressed by 1MDB’s legal advisors included that failure to obtain the obligatory independent valuation of PetroSaudi before injecting the billion dollars. The warning was overruled by Najib Razak as prime minister who had taken over all ultimate decision-making at the fund.

It is now well-known that $700 million of the initial billion dollar ‘investment’ made by 1MDB after the signing of that joint venture disappeared straight into the Good Star Limited account at Coutts Zurich belonging to Jho Low, on the pretext of a bogus loan repayment demand sent under the auspices of White & Case (the remaining $300 million would be siphoned out of the joint venture company by PetroSaudi itself and therefore also stolen).

In its briefing to 1MDB and its legal team, White & Case stated that the Good Star Limited account was “in the name of PetroSaudi” thereby falsely implying the company belonged to PetroSaudi and not the prime minister’s own proxy in the deal, namely Jho Low.

Further Borrowings Based On Bogus Assets

Even if White & Case failed to spot this initial fraud despite so many red flags, the Malaysian suit argues that all avenues for pleading ignorance over PetroSaudi’s fraudulent claims ended straight after the $1 billion payment was made, at which point PetroSaudi had instructed the law firm to cancel the Turkmenistan ‘option agreement’ under which the company at least held a right to purchase the oil extraction license they had implied they owned.

From that point of cancellation on 24th November 2009, the law suit argues, White & Case were fully aware that PetroSaudi retained no assets of genuine value in the joint venture company. Nonetheless, the law firm continued to help structure a further $833 million in so-called Islamic loans which were made between 2010-2011 by 1MDB to PetroSaudi, guaranteed on the basis of what White & Case knew to be those non-existent assets. The law suit alleges that this was dishonest assistance and misrepresentation of their client.

The board of 1MDB received no notice of the cancellation of the option agreement and continued to sign off on these loans to PetroSaudi’s off shore shell companies owing to the fraudulent claims.

Deal Was Already Done & Dusted Say White & Case

In response to these charges White & Case have issued strong denials.  Global Investigations Review reports that in its response to the civil suit the law firm has said it ‘could not have dishonestly assisted and conspired to defraud 1MDB, as claimed, because [it] played no role in negotiating the terms of the commercial arrangements between PetroSaudi and 1MDB, with “all major commercial terms” agreed before White & Case was even hired.‘ Similar arguments have been directed at Sarawak Report.

The claim conflicts with 1MDB’s contention that the firm represented PetroSaudi “at all material times” during the fraud, certainly from September 18th 2009, which was the day that all the formal parties to the deal were themselves being introduced.

That was the date Jho Low connected the director of PetroSaudi, Tarek Obaid, to the CEO of 1MDB through a telling email in which he stated to the key figures from the two companies that “discussions [are] on track with respect to your USd2.5b JVC partnership”.

Further emails show White & Case on the same day assisted PetroSaudi with the incorporation of the two key PetroSaudi subsidiaries to be involved in the joint venture. These were PetroSaudi Holdings (Cayman) Limited and the carefully named 1MDB PetroSaudi Limited (BVI) in which 1MDB was due to buy a minority shareholding for a billion dollars, according to advance plans drawn up by Jho Low’s own team and sent to the PetroSaudi fixer Patrick Mahony and Tarek Obaid four days earlier on September 14th.

Later on that same day, September 18th, the directors of the Board of 1MDB were also first notified of the Joint Venture plan by the management team.

The White & Case claim that commercial terms had already been agreed implies the law firm was indeed aware of Jho Low’s third party role behind the scenes. Documents and emails prove that throughout the negotiations their legal team was working from structures and plans that had already been drawn up by Jho’s team and lawyer in advance which were then forwarded to White & Case on various pretexts.

The key Joint Venture Agreement document that provided for the bogus $700 loan to be defrauded from 1MDB was drawn up by Jho’s lawyer Tiffany Heah on 21st September and sent to PetroSaudi’s Patrick Mahony, who in turn sent it to White & Case. Mahony then arranged with Jho and Tiffany to get the document sent again, this time officially from Wong & Partners as well to give an impression of due process.

White & Case lawyers then revised the document with minor amendments putting the document under the firm’s own official heading.

Other subsequent documents relating to the structure of the deal, the restructuring of the PetroSaudi group, the Loan Agreement and subsequent ‘repayment’ demand were likewise drafted during the period 14-29th September by Jho’s team and sent to Patrick Mahony. The key points in these documents were then incorporated into the official papers then produced by White & Case with their letterhead (see above).

White & Case may seek to argue the firm was unaware that the details they were working from had been supplied by Jho Low. However, correspondence makes clear members of the team were aware by the end of this process of the role of Najib’s informal advisor including the request that Jho’s lawyer should be allowed into White & Case to check off on the final documents.

Verifying A Fraudulent Bank Account?

(b) Account details for payment of 700,000,000 USD to an account in the name of PetroSaudi International Limited (Saudi)

To:                             J P Morgan Chase Bank, New York, USA.
ABA:                           21 000 021
Swift:                         CHASUS33
Account:                     544-7-44876
In favour of:                  RBS Coutts Bank Ltd
Swift:                         COUTCHZZ
Reference:                   For further credit to account 11116073

Due Diligence?

“We strongly refute any suggestion that White & Case acted in any way inconsistent with the highest ethical and professional standards. We are vigorously defending ourselves against the allegations in the complaint, which have no legal or factual bases.”

[By the Editor Of Sarawak Report]

I learned I’d been made ‘subject to an anonymity order’ only after my attention was drawn to a report in the UK Law Society Gazette.

The article explained that there had been a hearing of the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal (SDT) at which the Solicitors Regulatory Authority (SRA), in prosecuting a complaint I had made about the law firm Hamlins, had agreed that the identities of several witnesses and entities should not be disclosed, including me. The SDT had made an order to that effect.

No one had warned me about the proposed secrecy order or notified me about the hearing at which it was made; to me it felt like a stitch up. When I asked to see the memorandum that was issued, to understand the extent of the restrictions and who else was to be ‘anonymised’, I was told that the Respondent (defending party), a solicitor at Hamlins, had objected.  Instead, I was issued only with a three line instruction:
“The Tribunal orders that the disclosure or publication of any matter likely to lead to the identification of any person, entity or other matter anonymised in the proceedings is PROHIBITED.”

I was not enlightened as to what ‘matters, persons or entities’ had been anonymised (20 names and 81 dates/events were reportedly affected) or what might be considered as leading to their identification. I was told merely that the entirety of my own evidence would be heard in secret, behind closed doors, without any observers or reporters allowed.

Chillingly, I was also instructed that this meant I would not be allowed to talk about the fact I was a witness in the case, let alone write about it; even my gender must be disguised.

Did a disciplinary tribunal for a professional body I don’t belong to possess such draconian powers against me I wondered?  What about the right of the press to report quasi-judicial proceedings?  What if I outed myself by mistake and what could be done to me if I did?

Lawyers who have threatened me with ‘contempt’ have not hesitated to mention the words ‘fines’ and ‘jail’; would this be an example of contempt? I felt intimidated and worried about what this new level of secrecy means for the right of the press to report judicial proceedings.

My research soon informed me that I was caught in a ‘grey area’. Unlike a court of law, the SDT has no ‘powers of contempt’, but implies it could refer you to a court if disobedience can be shown to disrupt their work.

The SDT has been increasingly relying on secrecy and redactions to make it easier to use ‘privileged information’ to decide their cases (mainly emails between lawyers and their clients). However, many are concerned at the encroachment on civil rights and restrictions on reporting by an over-zealous response to AI and other information tools.

One lawyer, Tim Bullimore, has become a frustrated voice in pointing out that the SDT appears to be exceeding its powers if it is making orders which purport to affect the rights and freedoms of the public and the press. Rulings such as this only have the power of a withholding order, he argues, meaning that the SDT itself and those subject to it can’t release specified names but journalists who know them or find out cannot be gagged. He points out that it is absurd to suggest the public and press are bound by unpublished orders issued without notice or consultation by the SDT.

Court reporters had also protested at the prospect of being shut out during my evidence.  The situation was galling. I have no wish for my complaint to be kept secret and nothing to hide; I had already waived my own privilege given I had gone to the effort of making this complaint because of the very real public concern about abusive tactics against journalists.

As a result of my exposure of various frauds involving a web of politicians and businessmen, I have become an unwilling expert on the topic of so-called SLAPP suits (Strategic Litigation Against Public Participation), having been aggressively and abusively threatened by numerous defamation/’reputation management’ firms in the UK (dubbed the ‘libel capital of the world’).

It is not just freelance journalists, but major newsrooms and regulators themselves who are being routinely silenced by such threats made by a handful of law firms who earn millions out of a select group of super-rich clientele who thereby escape accountability.

These have included notorious Russian oligarchs, the head of the Wagner Group (while he was claiming not to be), multiple fraudsters and shady power-brokers across the globe. They bring their cases here to Britain, often to bully journalists who are not even living or writing in this country.

I am not going to reveal anything about the background to the complaint I made against Hamlins, beyond information which has been published by the SDT itself.  In short, one of the people mentioned in a series of articles said that they were defamatory. I settled, thereby avoiding costs.

I later published a book, which the claimant would allege put me in breach of the settlement.  My solicitor and I believed that the claimant’s solicitor (Mr Hutchings of Hamlins) made untrue claims and inappropriate threats in the course of making these allegations.  That was reported to the SRA, which led to the proceedings against Mr Hutchings in the SDT.

What was at issue before the Tribunal were the steps Hamlins took after the settlement I’d previously agreed to. I was accused of breaching the terms of that settlement (and thus of being in contempt of court) for an apparent ulterior motive. Hamlins wanted to obtain copyright to my relevant articles, so that they could then get copies of those articles taken down in the United States.

It was no secret to Hamlins when they took on these new proceedings that, though they were acting for an individual, their fees were being paid by a notorious entity. The company that employed their client and was footing their bills had long been identified by the US Department of Justice as a key party to a fraud I’d exposed. The company’s shareholder and a director have subsequently been sentenced to years in prison.

However, in a case which completed its journey through the SDT just before mine, another law firm, Carter Ruck, was exonerated for taking up cudgels on behalf of the notorious conwoman, Ruja Ignatova (the ‘Bitcoin Queen’) against members of the public – and even against regulators who had warned against her activities. The Financial Conduct Authority and the City of London police had posted warnings against Ignatova’s One Coin scam, but Carter Ruck had threatened them into taking them down and likewise gone after victims who had sought to alert others online about losing their life savings.

As the lawyer and tax camapigner Dan Neidle has pointed out, thanks to the warnings being removed, Ignatova was able to steal many more millions before vanishing. Yet the SDT has reasoned that the law firm was not aware of her fraudulent operation and so could not be sanctioned for acting for a client now known to be crooked (despite the open warnings of the regulator and law enforcers).

If important public watchdogs and authorities can be persuaded to withdraw warnings by reputation lawyers, which in turn can expect to be absolved of any misconduct by their own regulatory tribunal, what chance did I have?

Indeed, the SDT would proceed to rule in my case as well that the disparity of resources between a freelance journalist and a fraudulent enterprise who had stolen hundreds of millions should not be a consideration in its adjudication; Hamlins were not responsible for who was funding their client.

Pre-Publicity vs Post-Publicity

I was invited to speak with the SRA’s legal team to make sense of the SDT’s secrecy regime. It was explained to me that one reason for that regime was that ‘the cat was not yet out of the bag’ about who the parties were to this case: meaning that if the identity of Hamlins’ client had already been in news then the SDT would have judged it impossible to protect them, so tough they wouldn’t bother.

That had been the situation, for example, a month or so before when the ex-Chancellor Nadhim Zahawi’s solicitor faced proceedings in the SDT for making undue threats to the writer Dan Needle and there was no secrecy order made because everyone already knew the story and the names.

However, Hamlins’ client was now said to be out of the public eye. Thus, it seems, are rights and wrongs decided; consistency is not the issue.

Jigsaw Identification

However, the main reason I was ordered to be anonymised, as Mr Hutchings’ barrister articulated during the case management hearing to which I was not invited, was Hamlins’ concern that their client (Client A), who was not being prosecuted by the SRA, should be entitled to preserve the anonymity and not become known through ‘jigsaw identification’.

According to the Law Society Gazette, “Ben Hubble KC, for Hutchings, argued jigsaw identification could cause ‘prejudice’ to Client A, because Client B [me] had made a ‘false and defamatory’ allegation against him.”

The SRA’s own barrister had separately argued identification would undermine ‘Client A’s’ privilege (which they had not waived), and therefore conceded on my behalf that I should become anonymised – without consulting me – to make it harder to work out who Client A was.

The theory of jigsaw identification has become a popular concept in the age of AI. Once I was identified, the logic goes, then an enterprising journalist or member of the public could cross reference court records and news reports to identify Hutchings’ client.

In fact, to work out Client A’s identity simply from knowing my name is hard to say the least and takes specialist knowledge of the court system and record databases. Moreover, given the issues from the settled dispute had little bearing on the case before the SDT, and Mr Hutchings was the only respondent to that case, the identity of Client A was largely irrelevant to journalists reporting on it.

There was another massive hole in these various arguments, which I could have pointed out had I been given a voice. This was the apparent false assumption that the agreement I had reached with Hamlins’ client had included a secrecy clause which such settlements so often do.  To the contrary, Hamlins had specifically demanded that the court order I signed should be kept open so that it could be shown to others they were seeking to persuade to take down secondary articles.

What the SDT had achieved, therefore, was to turn an open agreement into a secret agreement. It felt like a form of SLAPP, effected not by a lawyer but by a tribunal and without me getting a single say in the matter.

With considerable misgivings, I agreed to continue as a witness under these conditions in the vain hope that the efforts by the SRA to bring some accountability to the UK defamation business might prove successful through this case. As I saw it, the stakes for society in enabling reporters to hold the richest and most powerful to a degree of accountability could not be higher.

Yet, on Day One of the trial last October the entire secrecy construct fell apart after the key arguments were uploaded onto the SDT website. Arriving as the first witness I had been told to redact my name from the court register, to hide myself away and not to talk to people in the corridor: generally to keep as low key as possible so that any journalists floating around wouldn’t clock me.

Just after midday, I nonetheless received an email from The Times newspaper.  The paper was following the case and understood that the anonymised journalist who had brought the complaint was me. This was “a significant case in the attempt to crackdown on Slapps” so would I agree to speak to their chief reporter?

There were many ways the The Times could have discovered my identity and may well have known it for some time. However, it would soon become clear that, completely separately, other third parties had meanwhile identified Hamlins’ client as well.

The same afternoon Tim Bullimore wrote to the SDT to warn them that Mr Hutchings’ main argument – published by the SDT itself – gave away Client A’s identity by quoting from a reported court judgment.  It was not the revealing of my identity that gave the game away, but the paperwork which appeared on the SDT’s own website!

Not wanting to derail the proceedings, I simply did not reply to The Times. However, it was obvious that the cat was most certainly now out of the bag, just as it had been in the Zahawi case a few weeks before. What was the point of keeping me secret when the Times had published my name and Client A could be easily identified from the papers published by the SDT?

By the end of the day The Times had published their story with a striking lead focused on the personalities involved:

The Duke of Sussex’s solicitor attempted to “blackmail” Gordon Brown’s sister-in-law with a threat which could have sent her to jail, a disciplinary tribunal has heard.
Christopher Hutchings, one of the country’s leading “reputation management” lawyers with a string of celebrity clients, is accused of acting dishonestly.

Transparency had prevailed after all and the inconsistencies were over; or so I thought. Hamlins’ client was not named by The Times, thereby preserving the intent of the order to the same degree as the Tribunal itself had done.

Nonetheless, far from giving up on the matter, I learned the SDT entered into a raging war of attrition with The Times. They wanted the article taken down; immediately.

The Times apparently asserted their own opinion that the SDT had no authority to make such demands and nor to issue reporting restrictions. While the battle continued into the night the article remained online for several hours.

In the end, The Times, for reasons I do not know, decided to comply with the Tribunal and removed the article from their website ‘without prejudice’. This, despite having described the case “as an important test of attempts by the legal regulators to crack down on so-called Slapps … defined as “a misuse of the legal system through bringing or threatening claims that are unmeritorious or characterised by abusive tactics, in order to stifle lawful scrutiny and publication”.

Empowered by this triumph, the Tribunal rather than accepting the cat out of the bag theory, attempted instead to thrust the genie back into the bottle. It ordered that further unprecedented levels of secrecy should be ordered over the remaining proceedings.

Under their revised ruling, the entire hearing would be held secretly behind closed doors with no reporters or members of the public allowed to attend at any stage whatsoever. Neither would I as the first witness be allowed to listen to the remainder of the proceedings or hear the other witnesses, as would normally be allowed. The observers who had been following the case were kicked out and the online feed went blank.

Even the SRA was moved to lodge an official letter expressing its concern at this crossing of a major new boundary against transparency. By now, it was clear to me that the case wasn’t making the situation better it was making it worse.

The nub of my complaint against Mr Hutchings is laid out in the documents published by the SDT. (links to those documents appear at the end of this article, so that both sides of the story can be seen).  Having agreed to sign a settlement to remove coverage of Hamlins’ client, I found myself re-approached by the law firm some months later alleging I had broken the settlement by an indirect reference in a book (which my lawyers refute).

The SRA’s case against Mr Hutchings was that he was trying to use the leverage of this threat of contempt proceedings against me with a different objective entirely. It was in order to get me to surrender my copyright over articles he wanted third parties to take off the internet in the United States. In the light of America’s press freedom laws some sites had refused to remove those articles, whereas copyright law give considerable powers of enforcement.

As the SRA put it, the threat made included a suggestion by Mr Hutchings that I was “liable, amongst other things, to be committed to prison for contempt. The threat was, therefore, one with very serious consequences”.

After what appears to have been considerable planning (including the writing of a script) Hutchings and a colleague had made what might be described as an ambush call to my solicitor. During the call they implied they had just read my book and that a top legal counsel had confirmed that its contents gave them a ‘strong case‘ to sue me for contempt, on the basis that it allegedly broke the settlement with their client (the actual phrase the counsel used was ‘a reasonably arguable case’).

Threatening “criminal sanctions“, like jail, they offered me “a way out” of the situation.  They would be willing to turn a blind eye to the alleged breaches in the book if I surrendered them my copyright over the earlier articles so they could force the recalcitrant US sites to take down the remaining posts under copyright law.

The SRA’s case was that the relevant correspondence showed that neither Mr Hutchings nor his client had any intention of carrying out the threat to litigate over the book. Mr Hutchings had, for example, told his client he was asking for the Counsel’s opinion only “on the basis we are aiming to set out a “credible threat” as you have rightly put it, to forcefully apply pressure on [Sarawak Report] to take steps to assist you more broadly, and you have no intention to pursue a full legal complaint for the potential contempt.”
He later reiterated ” I will stress that the strategy is to put forward a plausible threat with a view to engaging in discussions with [Sarawak Report’s lawyer] to seek an agreed remedy”

Mr Hutchings’ client (‘Client A’) in turn would emphasise several times they had no interest in taking legal steps to activate Hamlins’ exaggerated ‘strong claim’. For example: “There is no point litigating this, so the question is whether the threat is sufficiently credible and the threat sufficiently real, for [Sarawak Report’s lawyer] to advise offering up the [copyright] license to make it go away”.

Hutchings again responded “we are aiming to set out a “credible threat” as you have rightly put it, to forcefully apply pressure on [Sarawak Report] to take steps to assist you more broadly, and you have no intention to pursue a full legal complaint for the potential contempt.”

After that exchange, Hutchings wrote to his expert counsel: “ Client A’s underlying objective is to put [Sarawak Report] under sufficient pressure so as to obtain a license to copyright in [Sarawak Report] articles, which would facilitate our take-down requests for online content providers….. [Client A] wants to proceed with the threat on the basis [Client A] does not intend to litigate this but to apply pressure on [Sarawak Report] to take action… It is important of course that it is as compelling as it can be, to exert maximum pressure on [Sarawak Report]”

In response to this the counsel had replied by issuing a stark warning that what was being contemplated appeared tantamount to a criminal offence.  “[Client A] does not want to litigate for contempt ... The letter cannot be seen to be offering a ticket out – there can be no possibility at all of it appearing as blackmail, or contempt proceedings will be thrown out. Further, there is no collateral gain, only [Client B/Sarawak Report Editor] being imprisoned….”.

Despite this warning by their own counsel against saying or doing anything which might look like blackmail, the first thing my lawyer informed me having received Hutching’s call was that it was clear Hamlins were indeed attempting to blackmail me. On the one hand they had threatened they could land me in prison and with a heavy fine over the alleged breaches in my book, on the other they were offering a “pragmatic proposal” to drop their claim if I surrendered up my copyright.

No wonder, I thought, that the lawyers had decided on a phone call rather than the original plan of sending me a letter. However, in a follow up email, after I had emphatically rejected their suggestion as improper, Hutchings also put it in writing.

His email threatened that if I did not ‘reconsider my position’ and comply with his “pragmatic proposal” within seven days, he would sue me for a breach of a court ordered settlement which would carry ‘criminal sanctions’, including “the likelihood of an order being made for the Book to be pulped, [me] being fined and/or [me] being committed to prison for contempt.”

Later, Hamlins denied to the Tribunal that they had implied any quid pro quo in either the phone call or that email and claimed they were merely threatening legal action over my alleged breach of the settlement. In that case, I wondered, what was the “pragmatic proposal” they were asking me to “reconsider” that would avoid the pulping of my book and me being “committed to prison“?

If Hamlins were solely looking for the removal of alleged offending words how else could I solve their problem other than by pulping the book? They never said. Yet, in that same email, while seeking to deny their copyright objective, Hamlins also took the trouble to mention that in their legal opinion giving them my copyright fitted in with the order I had signed. There were no other suggestions for the ‘way out’ they had in mind.

If there remained any doubts about the intention of the call I believed these would be dispelled by further evidence produced by the SRA showing the Hamlins team had worked on a series of advance preparation notes entitled “Script for Call With [Sarawak Report’s solicitor]”. These notes were revised several times as the lawyers honed their pitch.

First, they framed how to make their allegation under the heading “Contempt of Court” – our client has been advised in clear terms that the serious breach amounts to basis to bring contempt proceedings. Your client should treat this seriously.”

Then, they crafted their follow up remarks under the heading “Way out – If your client will give an exclusive licence of copyright in the original unedited articles solely for the purpose of allowing A to have passages taken down by resistant platforms A may be prepared to forgo A’s right to go back to Court….. If option one is not accepted, left with only alternative, which A instructs me A will pursue, to bring contempt”

That script for the phone call might seem entirely consistent with the original plan warned against by counsel, as the SRA plainly thought. However, Hutchings would claim to the Tribunal that this script did not amount to a quid pro quo as argued by the regulator. The Tribunal would agree with him; at the end of the secret hearing it announced that it was dismissing the SRA’s allegations.

At the time I had rejected what I viewed to be a blatant blackmail attempt and decided to call Hamlin’s bluff. Sure enough, after I further rejected the follow-up email calling it criminal behaviour, the law firm backed off, in line with its client’s refusal to move beyond threats.

That established, I later reported the law firm to the SRA.

Tribunal Exonerates Hutchings On All Fronts 

If this was a strange backdrop to the secret hearing it soon felt even stranger to find myself questioned by a small group of self-regulating lawyers with no outside observer allowed to take note of what was said.

The line of questioning also seemed strange. Although Mr Hutchings was denying that he sought to bully me into surrendering copyright, I found myself challenged for being unreasonable in not having done just that.

Shouldn’t I have given in to the demand that was not made, asked his KC?

It was now being argued that it should have been perfectly acceptable for me to let Hamlins use copyright law to navigate US press freedom laws in order to get websites and a hosting company called WordPress to take down articles in the United States.

I thanked the KC for admitting that this was indeed the purpose of making contempt allegations against me, including threats of prison. However, there were no reporters or observers present to report the interchange or apparent contradictions.

The KC then claimed I had worked in cahoots with the management of the US hosting site WordPress. I explained I knew no one from WordPress. The barrister then produced an old email where I said I was glad I still had draft copies of my removed articles stored on the WordPress content creation tool (a separate service entirely) in my computer. This he alleged was evidence that I was indeed conspiring with the management of WordPress to frustrate their client!

Any blogger can download WordPress to create their content. The panel looked bemused, yet, it was the libel lawyers who were to be acquitted on each and every count.

Ruling right after the hearing came to a close the panel concluded it was not satisfied that Hamlins had tried to make improper threats or blackmail me, let alone employ an untruth by misrepresenting a legal opinion they’d received.

Indeed, if Hutchings had done that during his call with my solicitor, he testified it was merely “a slip of the tongue“.

In what might appear to be a contradiction, the SDT also agreed with another secret witness, a famous libel lawyer, who agreed with Hamlins’ KC that even if the quid quo pro was mentioned using copyright law to get round US freedom of speech protections was in their view a “permissible objective” for Hamlins to hold on behalf of their client.

So, Mr Hutchings was exonerated of the regulator’s charges of dishonesty and making improper demands, and the libel industry’s controversial tactics against the press were upheld.

Notably, the SDT did not award costs to Hamlins; was this a gentle nudge that defamation lawyers should ‘tone it down’?

If so that message was not received. The following day, one champion of the libel industry published another article in the Law Society Gazette. This time it was an excoriating denunciation of the SRA for its attempts to bring the UK’s reputation launderers to heel. These attempts must now stop thundered the libel lawyer.

Heavy lobbying of the Ministry of Justice is now further reported to have successfully persuaded the Labour government to drop anti-SLAPP legislation previously drafted then also abandoned by the Conservatives when they dissolved parliament before the last election. This week over 50 Labour MPs signed a petition to restore the pledge.

Until such time, well-heeled defamation lawyers can celebrate that their trade remains relatively unhindered in protecting the super-rich from unwanted comment.

Meanwhile, in the absence of affordable justice in this sphere, the right to a reputation remains an inaccessible expense for ordinary folk (including mere celebrities and politicians) whose pockets are simply not deep enough to engage the £1,000 an hour lawyers who prowl the Royal Courts of Justice.

And what about myself? I had made a complaint in good faith in order to highlight concerns about the tactics used to silence journalists and ironically exited the process under harsh instructions to remain anonymous and keep schtum.

When I asked what right it might have to gag me, the STC last week told me their ‘orders remain in force and are binding‘ but failed to cite under what authority or with what enforceability:

The Tribunal made orders regarding the anonymity of certain individuals, of whom you were one. Those orders remain in force and are binding. While you indicate that you do not propose to name other anonymised individuals, it may be that identifying yourself publicly in connection with the case could have the effect of identifying matters or individuals whose anonymity the Tribunal ordered should be preserved. [Clerk to SDT]

The same day the Tribunal published a whole new set of policies, without notice or consultation, re-asserting their right to issue reporting restrictions and sanction those who don’t comply, again giving no clear source for their authority.

Can this really be the case in modern democratic Britain?  I now think not. Senior lawyers tell me they believe the SDT has been exceeding its powers.  One High Court judge reprimanded the SDT in 2022 for the “creeping march of anonymity and redaction” in a different case, saying “sweeping anonymity orders in respect of the third parties ought not to have been made. Courts and tribunals should not be squeamish about naming innocent people caught up in alleged wrongdoing of others. It is part of the price of open justice and there is no presumption that their privacy is more important than open justice.”

That view can only be hardened by an even more recent court judgement which overturned a separate order made by the Tribunal where the judge said “What [a journalist] did and did not have a (legal) right to publish is, in the end … not [a question] on which the Tribunal was competent to give a definitive ruling.”

Therefore, The Times newspaper may have backed down but I have decided not to.

If it is found the SDT have not exceeded their legislated powers and that it is I who have exceeded my rights to freedom of expression and to report in the public interest, then I am resigned to pay the price.

Key Case documents from SDT Website:
https://solicitorstribunal.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/F-redacted-rule-12-statement-CH.pdf
https://solicitorstribunal.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/F-reply-CH.pdf
https://solicitorstribunal.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/REDACTED-SRA-v-CH-Skeleton-Argument_redacted.pdf
https://solicitorstribunal.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/F-respondents-skeleton-argument-for-the-substantive-CH.pdf

An upside may be the slap in the face for pricey ‘Slapp’ lawyers who specialise in defamation threats, given that online copyright fraud has become a cheap alternative to their services.

However, this easy route to silencing public interest journalism by issuing bogus copyright complaints to online search engines, such as Google, has become a major tool for fraudsters to cover-up misdeeds.

The reason for the effectiveness of this deceptive practice is that the unregulated US tech giants invest so little in consumer relations or accountability.

The sense of impunity is such that these trillion dollar companies, which earn billions and billions of dollars of annual revenue from controlling communications across the globe, show zero interest in dispensing any of their profits into a workforce to deal with justified complaints. They see no need to invest in such requirements.

It is a matter that is finally reaching a level of global concern as the consequences have started to bite in other directions, resulting in court cases like the one now facing Facebook about its alleged ruination of children’s lives.

Rather than serve their customers or listen to public concerns these companies are ploughing vast sums into the political campaigns of legislators in the United States to make sure their host nation continues to leave them immune from the laws that govern lesser entities like mere publishers, news organisations let alone journalists, professionals or individuals of any kind.

These include the laws of defamation and also copyright. Back in 2015/16 Sarawak Report experienced a deluge of Malaysian government commissioned vilification and defamation that was promoted via anonymous websites and Facebook sites hosted by what is now Meta and also Google. Two of the major PR firms responsible have been identified as Bell Pottinger and FBC Media, both now closed thanks to this and related scandals.

However, the tech giants simply walked away from responsibility having been exempted in their capacity as mere ‘platforms”.  Sarawak Report engaged Facebook senior officials pointing out that the posts defaming the site for reporting on 1MDB had been ‘boosted’ by the site to reach millions of extra readers in return for extra payments made by those PR companies.

They were therefore no longer acting as mere platforms, we argued, they were acting as publishers with far more reach than any mainstream media or book-seller.  Facebook, who are almost impossible to gain proper contact details for, simply did not bother to respond Sarawak Report’s complaints, NGOs, press enquiries or lawyers’ letters.

Likewise, Google which has set up a totally AI-driven public interface operation, is leaving complainants to flounder in circular discussions with artificial bots that simply refer them to ‘FAQ’ web pages or to no-reply email addresses.

True to form, therefore, in response to US legislation that requires platforms to ‘take down’ material that infringes copyright, the company has installed an automated process that flagged up concerns from the very beginning as being blatantly open to abuse.

Specifically, the reliance on robots provides a wonderful opportunity for unscrupulous reputation laundering outfits to make bogus copyright complaints about articles their clients have not been able to silence any other way, for example via expensive legal threats.

Google’s cheapskate, staff-free solution to copyright complaints is to simply takedown the article, without even notifying the site complained about in the case of Sarawak Report. It is then left up to the victim of the fake complaint (the real owner of the copyright) to find out about the removal of their material and then to embark on a complex complaints process where the tech giant turns a deaf ear, leaving each party to sue the other.

Three years ago this happened to Sarawak Report when the now incarcerated Kuwaiti fraudster, Hammad Al Wazzan, who had been working as a proxy for Jho Low laundering stolen Malaysian funds, sought to remove an article about him from this site.

He had already tried legal threats and bogus writs through London libel law firms which Sarawak Report withstood at the expense of enormous stress and inconvenience. These hadn’t worked because the article was true and Al Wazzan, like others who have threatened this site, did not dare to actually go to court. He was later jailed by Kuwait for the crimes revealed by Sarawak Report.

In the meantime, an online site in India called Ground News issued a copyright complaint in May 2023 to Google claiming they had the rights to the article (not Sarawak Report whom Hamad had sued) even though their website simply copied the headline and then linked readers back to Sarawak Report to read the rest.

This was sufficient for Google to simply remove the Sarawak Report article from their search engine thereby achieving what Mr Wazzan had sought through his legal threats but doubtless for a fraction of the cost (libel lawyers should take note of the dire threat to their lucrative income stream). The article became largely inaccessible.

Google had failed to notify Sarawak Report. When Sarawak Report did find out there was no one to complain to. The sole solution offered by Google’s complex automated process was for Sarawak Report to submit an online ‘counter-complaint’ form which we did in August 2024.

The same automated process promises that if you submit a counter-claim and the originator of the complaint cannot prove to Google within 10 days that they have initiated legal action against the alleged offender, then the link to the article will be reinstated in the Google search engine.

Yet, although there had been no such legal action for copyright violation and SR repeated its complaints, there was no reinstatement carried out by Google throughout 2024 or 2025.

Again this year Sarawak Report re-initiated the complaints process with the same disappointing result. There was no takedown within 10 days, despite the repeat counterclaim and despite the lack of legal action or any effort by the complainant to demonstrate their claim for copyright over the article written by Sarawak Report.

In the meantime, Google had demonstrated its own impunity and exemption from such copyright laws with regard to its own AI engines by itself ignoring SR’s copyright.  If you search the topic of Al Wazzan and his fear of being made a fall guy, Google’s AI extensively uses the content of the same Sarawak Report article and even acknowledges the article was authored by this site.

Despite the acknowledgement and despite Google’s own use of our copyright, the ban on accessing the Sarawak Report original link to the article continued for three years with no replies being offered to numerous complaints.

Today, the article has finally been restored to the Google search engine.

It took enormous time and effort, including emails requesting comment to Google’s press office (which were received but not answered) plus threats to marshal widespread support before action was finally taken to address a complaint that one customer service employee could have resolved in a matter of minutes.

Google has now sent an automated no-reply notice acknowledging there was no response to their automated request for evidence from the bogus complainant.

All this, simply because Google is exempted from the laws it helps to apply against others thanks to their unlimited budget to lobby legislators in the United States and the company does not wish to spend any of the billions it takes from the global community to fund jobs that provide accountability to the societies it sucks profit from.

This level of impunity and power urgently needs to be addressed in the public interest as far worse consequences beckon.

Returning online after three years – you can read the article here:

I Fear They Want To Make Me The Fall Guy! Hamad Al Wazzan – EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW