Sarawak Report website hacked, story deleted
The hackers removed a story about the double life of Abu Dhabi's Aabar Fund chairman Khadem al-Qubaisi.
KUALA LUMPUR: The Sarawak Report website, which has been carrying investigative exposés on the 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB) fund, has been hacked and one of the stories was deleted.
“On Monday, last week, highly professional hackers intruded into the Sarawak Report website. They started their work at 10.37am and within half an hour, had deleted one of our stories and then made sure to wipe it from the trash section on our site,” the Sun Daily quoted the website as saying.
“These hackers took care to disguise their IP address and then change it in a bid to hide their location.”
The hackers wanted to remove the story about the double life of Abu Dhabi’s Aabar Fund chairman Khadem al-Qubaisi.
Khadem, who is a civil servant working for the state of Abu Dhabi’s sovereign fund, was portrayed as a party-loving figure with images published in the Sarawak Report.
The article had focused on the fact that the fund, which has done a number of heavily criticised deals with 1MDB, had received a payment of over US$20 million from Good Star Limited – a company controlled by millionaire Jho Low, which the website had identified as the recipient of the secret US$700 million “loan repayment”, made supposedly to PetroSaudi from 1MDB.
Sarawak Report has also been facing pressure to remove certain images from its site days ago.
The website said a non-existent celebrity picture agency has pestered its internet server company to remove pictures showing Jho Low cavorting with Paris Hilton in France.
“This non-existent agency has used threatening and legal language, demanding we remove the pictures, which have been circulated on the web by various other online magazines since 2010, because they say they have the copyright.”
“So far, the non-existent picture agency has not provided proof of this copyright, nor has it shown any interest in being paid for the pictures. Instead, it has engaged in aggressive backdoor tactics to get our site and other sites to take down the pictures by threatening copyright action against our server companies,” Sarawak Report said.
- FREE MALAYSIA TODAY
THE SARAWAK REPORT STORY
All About Photos? – Latest Attacks Against Sarawak Report
Hudud images that must come down?
In recent weeks Sarawak Report has taken a front line position, reporting on a number of extremely serious issues to do with billions of dollars of missing money from Malaysia’s development fund, 1MDB.
We have released a considerable number of documents and emails that have raised uproar in Malaysia over issues of corruption, governance of the country’s finances and the rule of law.
However, it appears that for some of the main characters, who have appeared in our reports, there is more concern over certain photographs than whether or not they might be questioned or held to account over 1MDB.
We conclude this, because in recent days Sarawak Report has found itself subjected to a number of aggressive campaigns to force us to remove these photographs, which provided valuable corroborative evidence for our articles.
Paris Hilton after an excess of Cristal Champagne provided in yet another marathon session financed by Jho Low in the South of France 2010
Given the articles and pictures record vast expenditures by certain individuals, who are associated with the disappearance of billions of ringgit that were supposed to benefit Malaysia’s poor and backward regions, we believe they represent valid news content and it has been in the public interest to see these pictures.
Hacking
On Monday of last week highly professional hackers intruded into the Sarawak Report website’s administration.
They started their work at 10.37 am and within half an hour had deleted one of our stories and then made sure to wipe it from the trash section also of the site.
These hackers took care to disguise their IP address and then change it, in a bid to hide their location.
Al-Qubaisi at play – from the story someone paid professional hackers to remove from our site
Both IPs were linked to proxy servers and they disguised themselves as coming from Google – a fairly easy trick, according to web experts.
So, which was the story that the hackers wanted removed?
It was the story about the double existence of Abu Dhabi’s Aabar Fund Chairman, Khadem al-Qubaisi.
This article had focused on the fact that this chairman of a fund, which has done a number of heavily criticised deals with 1MDB, had received a payment of over USD$20 million from Good Star Limited.
Good Star Limited was the company we had identified as the recipient of the secret USD$700 million ‘loan repayment’, made supposedly to PetroSaudi from 1MDB.
We have established that Good Star is a company controlled by Jho Low.
By contrast, Khadem al-Qubaisi signs a cooperation agreement with 1MDB in 2013 under the eye of the PM
So, we queried, why did the Chairman of the Abu Dhabi fund Aabar receive this $20 million payment from Good Star, shortly after Aabar engaged in an unusual guarantee of 1MDB’s bond issue to buy up power-providers in Malaysia?
Several critics have queried why this deal, engineered by Goldman Sachs for a record 11% in commission payments, involved a guarantee by Aabar at all?
These critics have pointed out that under the terms of the guarantee agreement nearly half the money raised by the bond was committed to remain in Abu Dhabi.
Another picture someone wants us to take down.
They also point out that the deal also gave Aabar an option to buy up half of the power plants in question and that in order to buy itself out of these restrictions 1MDB may well have had to pay up to $1 billion dollars at a later date.
This weekend DAP opposition leader Tony Pua pointed out that, because of the way 1MDB chose to handle these transactions, the fund ended upraising over RM20 billion in borrowing to purchase just RM10 billion worth of power assets in Malaysia.
Therefore, we asked what happened to that missing money and why did the head of Aabar, which collaborated on these deals, receive a payment in 2012 from Good Star?
Now, we seek reassurance that the reason our article was hacked and taken down was not because certain parties were dismayed at our revelation over the payment?
Or, because the public posture of Mr al-Qubaisi as a sober civil servant working for the state of Abu Dhabi’s sovereign funds has been undermined by the party-loving images we published along with the evidence of his extreme wealth?
“Abuse of copyright”?
How much money can we waste here? – These pictures of Jho and Paris have been widely circulated on the internet since 2010 and yet now the ‘copyright holder’ wants them down.
Sarawak Report has simultaneously been faced with a different kind of attack, which was also been directed at getting rid of certain images on our site.
For several days a non-existent celebrity pictures agency has pestered our internet server company to make us remove the pictures we have shown of Jho Low cavorting in the South of France with Paris Hilton (he paid her millions of dollars on several occasions to come and join his champagne fuelled parties).
This non-existent agency has used threatening and legalistic language, demanding we remove the pictures, which have been circulated on the web by various other online magazines since 2010, because they say they have the copyright.
Time to hide expensive bad behaviour as Jho Low morphs into a ‘philanthropist’?
So far the non-existent picture agency has not provided proof of this copyright.
Nor has it shown any interest in being paid for the pictures.
Instead it has engaged in aggressive backdoor tactics to get our site and other sites to take down the pictures by threatening copyright action against our server companies.
Mr Jho Low has reportedly made commitments to obey his parents and turn over a new leaf when it comes to public displays of expensive debauchery.
So, we seek an assurance that it is not he who is behind this attempt to to buy up the copyright over these various pictures, purely in order to remove them from sight?
If Mr Low is attempting to retrospectively buy back his reputation by aggressively bullying news reporters into removing the evidence of his past misbehaviour, we believe he should provide Malaysians with proof that he is not using their own development money to do so.
Paris Hilton after an excess of Cristal Champagne provided in yet another marathon session financed by Jho Low in the South of France 2010
After all, the first pictures of this youthful tycoon’s ostentatious partying emerged shortly after the original PetroSaudi deal in September 2009, after which USD$700 million was diverted into the account of Good Star from 1MDB.
Another USD$160 million followed in September 2010 and a further USD$260 million was paid by 1MDB to PetroSaudi, which then passed the money to Jarvace via PetroSaudi Seychelles in order to buy out UBG bank, in which Jho Low had a stake and of which he was a board member.
Is it this money which is now being used to finance these aggressive ‘copyright suits’ to white-wash his image?
Concern that this might be the case has caused Sarawak Report to circulate (above) certain pictures that have already been in the public domain for over four years, but which we had originally felt too unnecessarily undignified for us to publish.
Did these people ever once think of the hungry Malaysian poor in whose name 1MDB raised so much money?
They include pictures of a plainly drunk Paris Hilton clinging to Mr Low while her short dress rides up to give full view to her underwear.
She is being carried out ‘legless’ from a nightclub.
If Mr Low (or his misguided supporters) believes that he can expunge such memories by throwing big bucks into legal action against us and others, we believe that such images should now be widely circulated, so they stick in people’s minds before any possible enforcement can take place.
Especially if the whole strategy is being funded by money siphoned from the public purse through 1MDB.
We suggest people download these photos and pass them to each other and put them on Facebook, along with the pictures that someone is trying to remove concerning Mr Low’s business partner Khadem al-Qubaisi
From publications all over the world – these antics have been there for all to see for four years, but now someone is trying to pretend they never existed
