Xavier Justo, a retired Swiss banker, has made a significant impact on the world with his courageous decision to blow the whistle on the 1MDB scandal.
In 2011, Justo took a bold step by handing over thousands of documents, including 227,000 emails, to British journalist Clare Rewcastle Brown. These documents, obtained from the servers of his former employer PetroSaudi, shed light on the alleged theft of hundreds of millions of dollars from the Malaysian state-owned investment fund, 1MDB.
The leaked documents have sparked a chain reaction of investigations in at least half a dozen countries, leading to what US Attorney General Loretta Lynch described as "the largest kleptocracy case" in US history.
However, Justo's actions did not go unnoticed. Later that year, he was arrested by Thai police and flown to Bangkok, where he was charged with attempting to blackmail his former employer, PetroSaudi. But beneath this seemingly ordinary charge lay a much larger story, one that would have far-reaching consequences.
