I have known Leslie Lopez since the early 1990s, when he was starting to make a name for himself as a business journalist. And he was a good journalist, tenacious and a good storyteller. Over the past 30 years, he has worked for international news organisations and, most importantly for a journalist, he has developed a wide range of people as sources.
We became friends — Leslie, Ho Kay Tat and I. And it was based on this friendship and the reputation he had built that I hired him in 2012 to be our editor-in-chief (EIC).
Looking back, there were a couple of things I overlooked. One is that Leslie holds grudges against people he deems to have crossed him. And because of his superiority complex, Leslie has a disdain for most other journalists. And it was this that was his undoing at The Edge. We were doing well and the EIC job was handed to him on a silver platter. But within weeks, we had a rebellion in the newsroom, and staff who had initially looked forward to having him as EIC could not work with him. He also fought with other heads of department and disrupted the culture of The Edge where teamwork was central.
It was during this tumultuous period in our newsroom in late 2012 that the 1MDB scandal started to be apparent. The Edge weekly started raising questions about the various dubious transactions from early 2013 after Kay Tat returned from The Star and Leslie was removed as EIC and given another role to start the digital-only magazine The Edge Review.
The Edge Malaysia's story on 1MDB in its April 1, 2013 issue. Photo: The Edge Malaysia
See also: Najib offers unreserved apology, regrets that 1MDB scandal happened under his watch
So when Leslie passed a message from Jho Low to Kay Tat in early 2014 asking us to stop questioning 1MDB, we became wary. We knew Leslie had been in close contact with Jho Low, which is not a bad thing if it is to be used as a source of information. But Jho Low was the principal actor in the scam and a compulsive liar who was also brazenly throwing money at people whom he felt would be of use to him, as court cases in Malaysia and the US and other documentary evidence have shown. They included Hollywood stars, government officials and media people.
Given the uneasy situation, we eventually decided to part ways with Leslie, who was given a generous payout, and The Edge Review was shut. We did not want to be distracted from our pursuit of wrongdoings and exposing the theft of billions from 1MDB by Jho Low and his band of crooks. After the separation, we heard from mutual friends that Leslie had rubbished our reporting on 1MDB but we chose to ignore it. We were, after all, good friends and it is rare to have amicable partings, so Kay Tat and I took it as part of life’s journey.
Hence, it was very painful to read the untruths and allegations Leslie made in his book The Siege Within about us — that we were part of a group of conspirators who weaponised 1MDB to topple Datuk Seri Najib Razak because he did not give me a daily newspaper licence.
See also: The original 1MDB crime, exposed in July 2015 by The Edge
In the first place, while another licence might be good to have, it was not important as we already had The Edge Financial Daily.
If I was an unscrupulous businessman, as Leslie suggests, I could have asked Najib, whom I considered a friend, for some lucrative government concessions in return for not pursuing stories on 1MDB. I could have done that, but I did not.
The whole country will remember that the mainstream media looked the other way even after evidence of wrongdoing surfaced. Some even praised Jho Low as a financial whizz-kid who was bringing billions in investments into the country.
But doing the right thing to protect the public interest is a core value of The Edge. We did not allow ourselves to be compromised.
Somehow, along the way, Leslie has allowed his bitterness to cloud his actions. His book is actually not an indictment of Kay Tat, The Edge or me. It is an indictment of Leslie himself.
Covers of the books by The Edge Malaysia (left) and Leslie Lopez.
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We were friends and I bear him no ill-will. But leaving his allegations unanswered will be grossly unfair to all our hardworking journalists. They and their families would have suffered when we were suspended — all because they believed in doing the right thing. Leaving Leslie’s allegation of a political conspiracy unanswered would be a gross injustice to others who had also wanted the theft of billions from 1MDB to be stopped. This desire had nothing to do with politics. It was our money that they stole.
Since we have just released our book, Behind the Stories, I think those interested in the truth should read both books and decide which one presents the true narrative of 1MDB and which one is just a spin.
In his book, Leslie chose to ignore a very significant but inconvenient truth because it did not fit in with his false story of a political conspiracy, that is, the role played by Nazir Razak.
Nazir in his own book What’s in a Name revealed how he had told me, after the initial series of articles the editorial team at The Edge had written in 2013 and early 2014, that we should pursue the matter more aggressively to prevent more billions from being stolen. Nazir played an important role behind the scenes and had warned his brother many times about what was happening. Nazir and I engaged often on what needed to be done. So, anyone who believes Leslie must also believe that Nazir aligned himself with Najib’s enemies to take down his own brother as prime minister. It doesn’t make sense but this truth, this inconvenient truth, was left out by Leslie because it did not fit his narrative of a political conspiracy involving me, Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad and Tan Sri Muhyddin Yassin.
In fact, Leslie’s narrative is consistent with that of Jho Low, who had been saying this all along. In a CNBC interview on March 13, 2015, Jho Low said speculation about his role in 1MDB was nothing more than “a politically charged effort”. Then in a Straits Times (ST) article dated Jan 6, 2020, written by no less than Leslie himself, Jho Low said again that the attacks on him were “politically motivated” and that he was just an “intermediary”. Leslie facilitated this spin by Jho Low by writing that article despite the fact that by 2020, everything had come out into the open, that Jho Low was the mastermind and the one who stole the most — US$2.45 billion to be exact.
The Straits Times article mentioned above.
That going after Jho Low and Najib was a political conspiracy is nothing new, as it was all along the spin spun by the thieves and their supporters.
But eight years after the US Department of Justice’s announcement on the “largest ever case of kleptocracy” in 2016 and the subsequent indictments all around the world, Leslie is still saying, through his book, that 1MDB was a political conspiracy to bring down Najib and, along with him, Jho Low and gang.
While we exposed the criminals and the embezzlements, based in part on the PetroSaudi emails from Xavier Justo, Leslie’s book desperately tries to present Kay Tat and myself as criminals because we took and used “stolen” emails to expose the crime. How we went about exposing the crime seems to bother Leslie more than the crime and the criminals.
The gist of what Leslie is emphasising is that because the PetroSaudi emails were confidential and stolen, they should not be admissible and it would be a breach for anyone to have access to them. But what he clearly refuses to accept is that the law provides that the larger good to the public overrides the protection of private rights, especially when criminal offences have been committed. That is why we have whistle-blower laws and other similar legislation.
Leslie also made the false claim that an article he wrote in a June 2013 issue of The Edge Review was “the first major news exposé on 1MDB”. There was no such article in June.
There was, however, an article he wrote “1MDB — The Big Gamble” in the July 19 issue of The Edge Review which he republished in his book. But this was not the first major news exposé as he claimed.
The facts tell a different story. Three months earlier in its April 1, 2013 issue, The Edge weekly published a cover story titled “What next, 1MDB?”, which red-flagged 1MDB’s rising debts and funny deals with PetroSaudi as well as its “accounting” profits. We also had a story on Jho Low himself. Leslie was not part of the team that worked on that story for the reason I explained earlier.
And KiniBiz news portal had also written on the subject before Leslie — “1MDB: Giant ponzi scheme or strategic investment fraud?” — on March 28, 2013.
The KiniBiz article mentioned above.
Why is Leslie so desperate to claim something that is not his to claim? Is it because of his superiority complex? Is he sore that he was left trailing behind (for reasons best known to himself) while others worked relentlessly to expose Malaysia’s biggest-ever financial scandal and was a big global story?
Anyone who has read the few articles he wrote after he returned to work for ST in 2016 will notice how soft he had been on Jho Low. This is not the Leslie many of us knew.
We can understand why Jho Low and gang feel bitter and angry over what we did. But one must wonder why Leslie feels the same way, even suggesting that we are criminals and that Justo was a rogue.
Surely Leslie knows he cannot whitewash Jho Low’s central role as the master planner of the scam at 1MDB and that he and his buddies stole at least US$4.5 billion from the people of Malaysia.
Instead of writing more spin, would it not be better for Leslie to convince his friend Jho Low to turn up in a court — whether in Malaysia, Singapore or the US, countries where he is a wanted man — to prove the existence of a conspiracy to politically weaponise 1MDB as both of them have alleged?
Tong Kooi Ong is chairman of The Edge Media Group
