Sarawak Report has acquired a dossier of damning proposals made by the discredited PR firm, FBC Media, to the government-funded Malaysian Palm Oil Council, for improving the industry’s tarnished image. It confirms the strategy of ‘greenwash’ to deliberately mislead the world’s public about the true nature of this massive agribusiness, which is tearing up the […]
American blogger Josh Trevino’s belated confessions about the more than one million ringgit he received from Malaysian PMs Abdul Badawi and Najib Razak to attack and slander the opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim and others has left his former colleagues and bosses at FBC Media exposed. This includes the high-profile CNN anchorman John Defterios, who was
Sime Darby is Malaysia’s largest company and the world’s largest palm oil conglomerate. It is predominately owned and controlled by the Malaysian Government. So, maybe little surprise that it is enmeshed in corruption, as laid bare by the arrest and charges against its former Chief Executive this week over the misappropriation of millions of ringgit.
The Conservative Party’s ex-Environment Spokesman, Bill Wiggin, agreed to play a starring role in videos promoting Sime Darby, after enjoying a luxury trip to Malaysia sponsored by the company. The palm oil giant, headed by former Deputy PM Musa Hitam, has been exposed as a major client of FBC Media, the disgraced British public relations
Once again Taib’s dirty tricks against Sarawak Report and Radio Free Sarawak have spectacularly backfired! In the past few hours it has emerged that the Chief Minister, along with his son-in-law, Sean Murray, was one of the clients who hired Bell Pottinger to alter Wikipedia entries about themselves, their companies, Sarawak… and, of course,Sarawak Report/Radio Free Sarawak! [..]
The UK media regulator, Ofcom, has now announced that it too will launch an investigation into the activities of FBC Media and its association with the Malaysian Government, Sarawak and other regimes with public profile problems. The announcement comes at the same time as confirmation by the British Foreign Office that it has launched a money laundering investigation into Taib’s assets in the UK.[..]
The BBC has confessed to numerous transgressions of its editorial standards by a number of programmes commissioned from FBC Media about Sarawak and Malaysia. In a report published today by its governing body, the BBC Trust, the Corporation admitted that the programmes, which were acquired by the BBC for ‘low or nominal cost’ from independent producers [..]
As the saga of Taib and Najib’s global image-building continues to unravel, we can reveal that they not only shared their PR advisors with the notorious dictator of Kazakhstan, but also with the even more horrendous regime of Uzbekistan, where dissidents are boiled alive!
Sarawak Report has learnt that FBC Media, the production company we exposed for taking nearly a hundred million ringgit to showcase Najib Razak, Taib Mahmud and other BN politicians and leaders from the palm oil business on its programmes, has gone under [..]
Taib Mahmud’s $5million dollar a year ‘Cyber-war Campaign’ has conceded a humiliating defeat, with the final demise of the site ‘Sarawak Reports'[…]
Knowledge and concern about the timber corruption associated with Sarawak’s Chief Minister is now spreading to the UK. Last week his name was raised in the UK Parliament’s upper chamber, The House of Lords [..]
New investigation into film maker that took millions from Malaysia By Ian Burrell One of America’s most prestigious magazines, the 154-year-old The Atlantic, has become the latest high-profile news organisation to launch an investigation into its relationship with a media company that was allocated millions of pounds by the Malaysian government. The Washington-based magazine and
The story of FBC Media has now hit the United States, where a number of media organisations, magazines and TV stations have had links with the company. The political blog site Politico has been following developments as our revelations started to hit in Malaysia and the UK today it reported that the magazine Atlantic Monthly, is also
Sarawak Report has received a copy of the actual letter and contract sent by FBC Media Chairman, Alan Friedman, to Chief Minister Taib Mahmud, outlining their illegal PR campaign. The total cost for FBC’s ‘Global Strategic Communications Proposal’ came to $5 million in the first year alone in a campaign designed to last at least 3 years. Sources close to BN have
FBC Media, in return for $5 million, had promised to radically boost Taib Mahmud’s international profile. In a personal letter to Taib the Chairman of FBC, Alan Friedman, guaranteed that he could provide promotional coverage on TV news shows, in newspapers and on-line. It was all illegal, of course, and at the taxpayer’s expense. But, when did corrupt practices ever bother the
Sarawak Report has already exposed how BN’s leading political figures, including Najib Razak, Abdullah Badawi, Musa Hitam and Taib Mahmud, paid the UK production company FBC Media to illegally gain positive publicity on global TV news shows. We can now reveal an even darker side to this campaign. The same contracts also included a series of negative blogging campaigns targetted against BN’s political opponents. All
If CNN had acknowledged concerns about FBC Media’s spin operations and agreed to investigate the possible contamination of its programmes, because of its connections with that company’s President, John Defterios, criticism might have died down. However, unlike the BBC and CNBC, who have both launched investigations and suspended FBC Media programmes, CNN has leapt to a fairly
Sarawak Report can confirm that the BBC appointed a team a week ago to examine FBC Media’s activities. They had been alerted to the PR/Production company’s activities and were able to look at its website and other publicity material before FBC withdrew it after being approached by journalists on Thursday [..]
The global news broadcaster CNBC has axed its flagship business show World Business, following an exclusive expose earlier this week by Sarawak Report.[see previous story] We revealed how BN politicians, including the Prime Minister Najib Razak, Abdullah Badawi and Taib Mahmud have been paying the production company, the UK-based FBC Media, millions of ringgit of taxpayers’ money to
Taib is paying a crooked, British-based PR company $5 million (RM15 million) a year to conduct an illegal global media campaign against Sarawak Report. We expose FBC Media, a UK-based TV production company, which doubles as a “strategic communications” firm, for conducting an illicit media scam over the past decade. The outfit is secretly selling
