Rooting out corruption – from the bottom

PETALING JAYA: While her name has frequently been linked to exposes of 1Malaysia Development Berhad, Clare Rewcastle Brown says she was not afraid to wade into it because her uncovering of the scandal was a gradual thing.

“The interesting thing to me about this story is that I actually started at the bottom – the effects on the indigenous people of Sabah and Sarawak and the destruction of the rainforests and the effects of corruption and trying to draw people’s attention to it,” she said.

“The more I looked into these corrupt practices that were causing so much devastation, I just found myself looking higher and higher, until you realise where corruption begins. At the top. And there was so much global complicity. The corruption does not just lie at the doors of Malaysians.”

In 2015, Rewcastle Brown lodged a police report after being followed in London’s Hyde Park, and that was far from the limit of the harass- ment and intimidation she and her sources allegedly faced.

“I have learned even more the extent to which I was being tracked. It was horrifying.

“I met up with people who were involved in those operations. When you think of the money spent on following you around and disrupting your operations, it just seems ridiculous.

“It used to make me angry because money that could have been spent on worthy causes was being wasted.”

For example, shortly after deputy public prosecutor Kevin Morais was kidnapped and brutally murdered, Rewcastle Brown said she discovered that e-mail sent to her, supposedly originating from him, had been “magically erased from my Inbox”.

“Luckily I was able to ... retrieve those messages. A computer expert checked and confirmed that my computer was sending messages back to Putrajaya, and I knew what that meant.

“I was shaken but not so surprised. Obviously very distressed.”

The late Kevin Morais was a DPP with the Attorney- General’s Chambers and Malaysian AntiCorruption Commission (MACC). He was murdered in September 2015.

His brother Charles made a statutory declaration stating that Kevin was the DPP tasked with investigating then Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Tun Razak over money misappropriated from the 1MDB-linked company SRC International.