Billion Dollar Whale: The Man Who Fooled Wall Street, Hollywood, and the World

Further Discount to RM61!

IMPORTANT NOTES
FILLED WITH JUICY DETAILS ABOUT HOLLYWOOD AND WALL STREET TITANS: From Hollywood names like Leonardo DiCaprio and Miranda Kerr to some of America's most prominent bankers like Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein and Gary Cohn, now President Trump's top economic advisor, the book is filled with juicy inside stories of bold-faced names. One example: On New Year's Eve in 2012, Jho Low flew friends including DiCaprio and Jamie Foxx in rented Boeing-777 airliners for a champagne-soaked double-dateline celebration, first in Sydney and then in Las Vegas.

The definitive inside account of the 1MDB scandal, "a true life thriller" (Ben Mezrich) about a "modern Gatsby" who managed to swindle over $5 billion with the aid of Goldman Sachs and others, exposing the secret nexus of elite wealth, banking, Hollywood, and politics--from two award-winning Wall Street Journal reporters. 

AN EPIC STORY OF HUBRIS AND GREED, WITH A LARGER-THAN-LIFE VILLAIN INFATUATED BY HOLLYWOOD: The story of Jho Low has it all: a terrifying, sociopathic villain; a heroic foil; and great American characters like the FBI and Goldman Sachs. Jho Low's personal haul from the 1MDB fund totaled into the hundreds of millions of dollars and he spent it recklessly. One night at the The Palazzo casino on the Las Vegas Strip, Low lost half-a-million dollars in a single hand of baccarat. Upon leaving the casino, he handed shocked casino staff $1.8 million in tips.

FLY-ON-THE-WALL REPORTING: Hope and Wright will employ phone-conversation transcripts, board-room minutes, and investigative documents, all originally sourced for and exclusive to this work, in tandem with recollections from those closest to Najib and Low, to create a tight, tick-tock narrative, a la Michael Lewis or Ben Mezrich.

THE STORY
The dust had yet to settle on the global financial crisis in 2009 when an unlikely Wharton grad set in motion a fraud of unprecedented gall and magnitude--one that would come to symbolize the next great threat to the global financial system. The nuts and bolts of the scheme were shockingly simple: A young, big-talking, huckster persuaded the Prime Minister of Malaysia to create an investment fund that he would direct from the shadows, raised more than ten billion dollars from global investors with the aid of Goldman Sachs and others, and over the next half decade siphoned off no less than $5 billion: money used to finance elections; to purchase luxury real estate in London, New York, and Los Angeles; to produce Hollywood films, including The Wolf of Wall Street--and to throw champagne-drenched parties around the world. Low's largesse also won him friendships with Hollywood actors, Victoria's Secret models, and even with a member of President Obama's inner circle.

More staggering still, no one seemed to notice--not the global banks, such as Goldman and J.P. Morgan, who turned a blind eye to shady transfers of hundreds of millions of dollars; and not the international auditors, central bankers, and official financial-system watchdogs.

At the center of this fraud was Jho Low--a character so preposterous he seems made up. Federal agents who helped unravel Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme say the Jho Low affair, when its full contours become known, will become a textbook case for tracking transnational fraud in the modern age. BILLION DOLLAR WHALE will become a classic, harrowing parable about the financial world in the 21st century.

For readers of Liar's Poker, Den of Thieves, and Bad Blood, Billion Dollar Whale will become a classic, harrowing parable about finance run amok.