Welcome back to bribes, swindle, or steel.

I'm Alexandra Rogge, and today we're going to explore the 1MDB scandal out of Malaysia.

Apparently every country gets to have its own water gate these days.

We recently discussed the Anglo-leasing scandal as Kenya's Watergate, and OneMDB has been

described as Malaysia's Watergate. We're speaking today with the reporter who has done the best work on

the story. He's a financial reporter for the Wall Street Journal. He was a correspondent in New York

when he began reporting on OneMDB, but is now based in London. He has reported previously from Abu Dhabi, Cairo, and Beirut.

And it was a great pleasure to have him join us at Cambridge last year for the Greed Project.

Bradley Hope, welcome to the podcast.

Thank you very much.

Thank you for joining me and taking the time to do this.

You've written a great deal on 1MDB, but you wrote one piece early on, Malaysia's

1MDB decoded. So perhaps we can start there. Yeah. Well, actually, I would like to say at the outset,

that this is a big Wall Street Journal team effort, so it's not just me by myself, especially my

colleague in Hong Kong, Tom Wright, and I have been working on this a lot since for two years now.

And another thing to mention is that everything in this case is still alleged.

There's no criminal charges, and there's no indication there is criminal charges.

There's only an announcement that they're conducting a criminal investigation.

One MDB decoded.

So basically, this is a Malaysian sovereign wealth fund

that was created back in 2009.

And one thing about it is it accumulated an enormous amount of debt.

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