Clare Rewcastle Brown: The cost of exposing Malaysia’s biggest corruption scandal

By Anna Scott

Clare Rewcastle Brown, an investigative journalist known for uncovering a multi-billion dollar kleptocracy scandal, has been sentenced in absentia to two years in a Malaysian jail for ‘defamation’, despite correcting the error in 2018.

Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has condemned this criminal case as an attempt to silence Rewcastle Brown and dissuade other journalists from covering government corruption. There will be an appeal hearing in Malaysia on 18 May.

But, after surviving years of intimidation and threats due to her reporting in the region, the 66-year-old seems relatively unfazed by her legal battle with Nur Zahirah, Sultanah of the Malaysian state of Terengganu. “I’m used to this kind of stress,” she says, speaking via video call from her home in London.

Numerous campaigns have attempted to silence Rewcastle Brown’s reporting. She has been threatened, harassed, and hacked since starting to cover corruption and environmental crime back in 2006. “For two or three years, every time I went out of the door, I could sense it. I knew I was being followed,” she says. “They were trying to frighten me all the time, but I wasn’t prepared to be frightened.”

Despite her legal case and history of intimidation, Rewcastle Brown remains committed to investigative journalism. She worked for the BBC, Sky TV, and ITV London before going freelance in 20o1. Today, she continues to cover environmental and political stories from Sarawak, an Eastern Malaysian state – and her childhood home – on the island of Borneo.

Her father’s work brought the family to Southeast Asia, and she grew up understanding the immense importance of the region’s biodiversity. So when, in 2006, she returned to Sarawak as a freelance journalist and learned of entrenched corruption between logging companies and the state, she grew determined to expose what she could.

Living in London, more than 10,000 miles from Sarawak, has allowed Rewcastle Brown to report stories too dangerous for local reporters to publish themselves. In 2010, she founded Radio Free Sarawak and The Sarawak Report, an English-language online publication that works closely with Malaysian journalists and sources. As English was taught in East Malaysian schools until 1968, and many people still use it to communicate, language proved no barrier to accessing information.

In 2015, The Sarawak Report exposed one of the world’s largest and most audacious corruption scandals: 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB). Working with brave, high-level whistleblowers, Rewcastle Brown found the then-prime minister, Najib Razak, to be systematically syphoning billions of dollars of public money through 1MDB.

Far from benefitting the people of Malaysia, this quasi-sovereign wealth fund was seemingly created to win Razak the 2013 election. The cash also funded, among other things, Martin Scorsese’s blockbuster, The Wolf of Wall Street, and Nadjib’s wife’s extortionate shopping habits. “I’m very aware of the privileges I have as a Western-based journalist,” says Rewcastle Brown. “I was behind a bunker in the West, taking on a regime that people living there couldn’t.”

RSF ranks Malaysia as the 107th worst country (out of the 180 it has measured) for media freedom globally – and it’s getting worse. Malaysia’s ranking has dropped significantly since 2023, when it placed 73rd.

Yet Rewcastle Brown’s ‘western bunker’ was not impenetrable. Her phone was stolen, and distorted versions of her emails were published online. “It was all disprovable because I had my genuine emails that I could counter with, but it was pretty nasty,” she says.

Rewcastle Brown’s investigations coincided with the early days of black PR operations; she became a target of sustained online disinformation campaigning. The Malaysian press picked up fake news articles claiming the country’s opposition parties paid Rewcastle Brown. These lies were then amplified by a “huge army” of fake Facebook accounts. “It was kind of pathetic, really,” she says.

The black PR ops extended to her husband, Andrew Brown, a former journalist who was, at the time, working in public affairs for EDF Energy. Brown also experienced defamation attempts, and their two sons, who were teenagers at the height of the intimidation campaign, sometimes felt frightened.

On one occasion, Rewcastle Brown was in a café with her 16-year-old son when she received an email saying a hit man was stalking her. “My son was upset by that and marched me to the police station to report it,” she says. “But that was no use whatsoever. The comment from the police officer was: ‘Well, you’re a journalist, isn’t this what you’re in for?’”.

In some ways, the policeman was right. Rewcastle Brown’s 1MDB investigation had revealed corruption at the very core of the Malaysian government. “You shouldn’t underestimate the resources of a state to come after you,” she reflects.

In her 2018 book, The Sarawak Report: The Inside Story of the 1MDB Exposé, Rewcastle Brown mistakenly wrote that, prior to the 1MBD fraud, the Sultanah of Terengganu had introduced a man to her husband, the king, who would later become a major player in the case. Although Rewcastle Brown never insinuated that this introduction was linked to the fraud and quickly amended her error, the Sultanah took a civil case to the Malaysian High Court in 2022.

While the High Court initially found no defamation, it overturned this ruling in 2023. Malaysia’s Federal Court subsequently refused to reconsider the case, leaving Rewcastle Brown no option but to pay damages to the Sultanah.

In parallel, the Sultanah also brought a criminal case to her local Magistrates’ Court in Kuala Terengganu. In February 2024, this Court sentenced Rewcastle Brown, in absentia, to two years in jail for defamation. “It’s depressing because they [the Malaysian court] have so clearly broken their own laws on this,” she says. “It’s an example of how powerful, politically connected people in certain countries can just make sure the law works to their advantage.”

Suyin Haynes, a journalist and lecturer based in the UK, met Rewcastle Brown a decade ago and was struck by her “steadfast determination and commitment to the pursuit of truth and holding power to account”. She says: “This latest raft of legal intimidation is yet another attempt to discredit her vitally important investigative reporting on corruption and kleptocracy.”

RSF has frequently spoken out in support of Rewcastle Brown. Fiona O’Brien, UK Director of RSF says: “We have been calling on the Malaysian authorities to reverse this injustice, and also on the British Government, to call out this wrongful pursuit of a British journalist.