r/malaysia • u/watchfalsework • 11h ago
Economy & Finance Forty years before 1MDB, Bank Bumiputra lent nearly US$1 billion to one Hong Kong property group - and the auditor sent to check was found murdered
reading up on the carrian case again and its wild how much of the 1MDB playbook already happened in 1983. bank bumiputra's HK subsidiary lent close to a billion US dollars to carrian, a property group run by george tan, a former pest control man nobody in HK finance had heard of a few years earlier. when the loans went bad the bank sent an internal auditor, jalil ibrahim, to look at the files. he was found strangled in a hotel room in july 1983. a man was convicted of the murder, and from the witness box he accused tan of ordering it, which tan's lawyers denied. nobody else was ever charged over the death.
tan was arrested twelve weeks later, and thirteen years after that he pleaded guilty in HK to conspiracy to defraud the bank. petronas ended up bailing out bank bumiputra, and not for the last time.
feels like malaysia's original state bank scandal but it barely gets talked about compared to 1MDB. anyone here old enough to remember how it was covered at the time?