The Kleptocrats Review: A case of life imitating art and art imitating life in this gripping documentary about Malaysia’s 1MDB scandal and the Oscar-nominated film at its centre.
If you have watched Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street and/or downloaded music tracks owned by EMI publishing – think Queen, Calvin Harris, Drake just to name a few – you have inadvertently contributed money to the world’s largest white-collar heist ever uncovered. A scam so pervasive that it spans from its origin in the highest echelon of the Malaysian government to international money laundering endeavours on the other side of the world.
The film begins at Red Granite’s Cannes Lions World Wide Event Management launch party in 2011, where celebrities such as Leo DiCaprio and Pharrell Williams watch on as Kanye West and Jamie Fox belt out their hit Gold Digger to an eager crowd. As one reporter states ‘it’s bizarre cause no one actually knows who Red Granite actually is’. So, who is Red Granite and how are they embroiled in a money laundering scheme that helped to funnel billions of Malaysian taxpayer dollars into the hands of two key players: mysterious Malaysian playboy banker, Jho Low, and then Prime Minister of Malaysia, Najib Razak (who led from 2009-2018)?
Directors Sam Hobkinson and Havana Marking set out to explain this complex web by breaking the film’s story down with melodramatic title cards such as ‘Who is Jho Low?’, ‘The Documents’, and ‘The Bust’ with each card detailing an element of the scam, how it was discovered, its interconnectivity and providing, at times, documents, text messages and other evidence used by the US Justice Department to build their case against Low, Razak and others.
The discovery begins in New York City with investigative journalist Louise Story – who also serves as co-producer – looking into the illegal flow of money into the US via high-end real estate deals and their links to shell companies where the owners could be hidden. Filtering through documents, she discovers a link in one of the deals to the co-founder of Red Granite productions, Riza Aziz, whose company was producing DiCaprio’s pet project, The Wolf of Wall Street.
The link to Hollywood leads Story and other journalists from The Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and The Washing Post down a rabbit hole of obscene misappropriation and money laundering using fraudulent shell companies and complex opaque financial transactions including high-end real estate, gambling debt payments, luxury yachts and…you guessed it, the funding of Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street.
Following the money trail from Malaysia to the middle east and the US, the ironic parallel between Jho Low and DiCaprio’s character Jordan Belfort is not lost on anyone. Title card by title card, the shocking lengths Razak, through intermediary Low, went to, to steal billions of Malaysian tax-payer dollars invested in the national 1MDB fund is revealed.
Created with the intention to invest in a ‘brighter, better, future for the country’, alarm bells sounded when it is discovered that the 1MDB fund invested not only US$1billion in Petro Saudi – a company that was barely a year old – in 2010, but that investigators had documents that purported to show details of additional money moving between 1 MDB and a shell company controlled by Low.
The film doesn’t shy away from the tentacles of corruption when crackdowns begin on opposition party members, student protestors and the press as they get closer and closer to the truth. Rather, the filmmakers highlight these truth warriors with personal interviews interspersed with clips of mass protests and uprising against government corruption. They also don’t shy away from scolding members of Hollywood who, though not complicit in Low and Razak’s financial crimes, happily accepted Malaysian money for years to fund their own desires without wondering where it was actually coming from.
The Kleptocrats is definitely no national tragedy. It’s an engrossing tale of do-gooders determined to expose and remove political corruption at any cost.
The Kleptocratswas reviewed at the Sydney Film Festival by Sacha Hall, June 2019.
