The 1Malaysia Development Bhd (1MDB) scandal has been framed in many ways by state agencies, lawyers, judges, journalists and bloggers. But for all that has been said and written about a national debacle like no other in world history, no one has been able to capture and recreate the real drama of the financial swindle that changed Malaysian politics forever.

Until now. In The Siege Within, award-winning news sleuth Leslie Lopez offers a new portrait of this epic from start to finish in a comprehensive single-volume account.

Lopez, a native of Malaysia who has covered regional politics and business for a number of leading publications, including The Wall Street Journal, leans heavily on a particular brand of journalism that is all too rare – thoughtful presentation of facts that is based on painstaking reviews of classified material and access to highly placed sources from within the inner circles of politicians at the top, leading officials in government agencies and high-flying corporate executives. It’s a rare breed of journalism in a world of the 24-hour news cycle, and it has allowed Lopez to offer a reconstruction of a saga that, by his telling, is emblematic of decades of high level corruption, plundering by the state and extractive policies that have together made Malaysia one of the worst performing economies in Southeast Asia.

By seamlessly weaving history, politics and intrigue, bringing nearly four decades of reporting to bear on The Siege Within, Lopez offers a narrative of epic proportions, revealing to the reader many previously undisclosed but explosive slices and moments of contemporary Malaysia before meticulously dissecting the 1MDB scandal with vivid story-telling that unravels a complex financial fiasco while presenting the big picture. The narrative takes the reader through a series of events over the last three decades, previously viewed as separate but which are in fact, as only Lopez may show, unifying beneath the surface. Lopez charts a journey through history, leading to the incorporation of 1MDB, which in itself was riddled with serious wrongdoing and made possible with the connivance of a prime minister called Najib Razak, his government, regulators, bankers and lawyers.

The saga presented in The Siege Within is also peppered throughout with responses from fugitive Low Taek Jho himself, seen by the informed as the architect of IMDB, a man who remains on the run from Malaysia and the USA and with whom Lopez has been able to conduct exclusive interviews.

As The Siege Within will reveal to readers, the 1MDB saga isn’t simply a tragic tale of business malfeasance and corporate criminality of huge proportions. It also has a previously untold political dimension that revolves around how the 1MDB saga was weaponised to bring down the now jailed Najib and his government. After that objective was achieved in the May 2018 general election, an event that signalled the collapse of a political coalition that had held uninterrupted power since independence in 1957, a massive campaign was launched to cover up what really happened in ground zero of IMDB.

Lopez was the first reporter to expose the 1MDB scandal, despite claims to the contrary. The fact remains Lopez wrote a story that appeared in an experimental digital magazine start-up called The Edge Review, which he led. The cover story in the 19 July 2013 issue was headlined 1MDB: Malaysia’s US$12 billion hot potato. The report was based on official corporate documents filed at government agencies and comprehensive background interviews with bankers, government officials and executives at the state-owned fund. It provided the first serious peek into the affairs at 1MDB and won the prestigious award for Excellence in Business Reporting from the Society of Publishers in Asia (Sopa). The story headlined "The Big Gamble” was singled out by the Sopa judges for putting the “1MDB story into context and conveying the potential for trouble”.

The Siege Within offers the most hard-hitting, deeply sourced examination of the 1MDB fiasco ever. Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim himself told Lopez: “The more accurately the story is told, why our checks and balances failed and who else was complicit, needs to come out because the country can’t afford for this to happen again.”

The potentially explosive disclosures in The Siege Within will almost certainly renew debate over the 1MDB affair, which until now has been laden with selective reporting of accounts that shade the truth and cover-ups that protect people in high places who were complicit in this nasty affair. This book will only intensify the pressure on the Anwar government to revisit an ugly chapter in Malaysian history and bring the details of the cover-up into the public domain.