A campaigning British blogger who is a sister-in-law of former Prime Minister Gordon Brown is the subject of an arrest warrant in Malaysia after she published stories on the financial affairs of the country’s leader Najib Razak.
Clare Rewcastle Brown is the London-based editor of Sarawak Report, which is dedicated to the Malaysian state on the island of Borneo, and has used investigative journalism to campaign relentlessly against corruption in the south-east Asian nation. With The Independent, she has exposed the destruction of Sarawak’s rainforest by the lucrative palm oil industry and Malaysia’s attempts to buy credibility for its environmental policies in the international media.
The blog’s recent revelations, focusing on almost $700m allegedly channelled into Prime Minister Mr Najib’s personal bank accounts, have also been reported by the Wall Street Journal. Malaysia’s anti-corruption agency has said the money came from “donor contribution” to the Prime Minister and not from the state investment fund 1MDB, which is the subject of an official investigation into missing money.
Malaysia's Prime Minister Najib Razak (Getty Images)
Sarawak Report published documents on 30 July which it claimed showed that the Malaysian Attorney General Abdul Gani Patail, who was sacked on Monday of last week, was preparing an arrest warrant for Mr Najib.
The Royal Malaysia Police issued a statement saying it had “successfully obtained a warrant of arrest” against Ms Rewcastle Brown. It said it would be applying to have her placed on the Interpol Red Notice wanted list, as well as the wanted list of Aseanapol, the inter-Asian police agency, which has its secretariat in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia’s capital. She is accused of “activity detrimental to parliamentary democracy”.
Read more: Allegations of government corruption in Kuala Lumpur
Ms Rewcastle Brown, who was born in Sarawak, responded with her own statement on the “counter-productive” nature of the warrant. “It is they who are being detrimental to democracy by suppressing free speech and arresting people for questioning people in authority,” she said.
A rainbow forms over the Ulu Baram rainforest in Sarawak (Getty)
“I am still unclear whether the agents of the Prime Minister are accusing me of ‘forging false documents’ or obtaining documents through ‘criminal leakages’, since they have simultaneously accused me of both in the past few days and have been rounding up all sorts of senior investigators to try and find out who might have passed me such leaks.”
Ms Rewcastle Brown said she was driven by “my motivation and duty” and was aligned to “no plot and no vested interest”.
