Written by the Taxi Driver
Paris Hilton topless on a yacht off St. Tropez and partying at La Voile Rouge on Pampelonne beach in St. Tropez on her never ending France vacation financed by her new Malaysian tycoon boyfriendTaek Jho Low. Note the liberal use of bottles of champagne as super soaker. Because it is just what spoiled little rich bitches born into money do, Paris Hilton has been on a whirlwind vacation for around a month or so. By the way, I don't know who's bright idea it was to let Paris Hilton put her whore mouth on the biggest bottle of champagne ever, the same bottle that will be passed around like it was Paris Hilton's vagina. Everyone at this beach party now have oral herpes.
What recession? Tycoons spend £1.8 million on champagne in St Tropez
Paris Hilton watched as the rival tycoons Zhen Low and Winston Fisher competed to see who could order more £600 bottles of Cristal in a St Tropez nightclub.
Paris Hilton watched as the rival tycoons Zhen Low and Winston Fisher competed to see who could order more £600 bottles of Cristal in a St Tropez nightclub.
As Joan Collins and her friends descend on St Tropez this week for a party on board Lady Joy, the yacht owned by the American socialite Denise Rich, they have been made to look positively austere.
Mandrake hears that two rival billionaires spent a staggering €2 million (£1.77 million) on champagne at Les Caves du Roy nightclub. Zhen Low, the younger brother of the Malaysian tycoon Jho Low, became involved in a competition with Winston Fisher, a New York property developer, to see who could order more £600 bottles of Cristal for their chums.
Guests included Paris Hilton, the socialite, who helped the cherubic Jho celebrate his 28th birthday with a four-day party in Las Vegas
The disastrous performance of the fund has been complicated by the circumstances of its 2009 inception. It was proposed to Najib by Jho Low Taek, then a 27-year-old investment advisor with a lot of Middle Eastern friends and a reputation as a playboy who made the papers of New York tabloids, partying with the likes of Nicole Ritchie and Paris Hilton as well as the prime minister’s wife, Rosmah Mansor.
Jho Low Taek, a hard-partying young friend of the Najib family, may have used Malaysian government guarantees to back the making of The Wolf of Wall Street, a hit movie starring Leonardo di Caprio, and to fund his attempt to take over three of London’s most prestigious hotels.Najib is the chairman of the 1MBD advisory board and the motivating force, apparently on the advice of Jho Low, as he is known, a putative whiz kid who is alleged to have steered the fund first into a disastrous alliance on oil exploration on the advice of a Saudi prince he went to school with in London.When Mahathir began his campaign against Najib more than a year and a half ago, it was given little chance. The former Prime Minister had been out of office for more than a decade and was regarded as a loud but irrelevant force. But political analysts in Kuala Lumpur say his campaign has been gaining traction over the 1MDB issue
“Realistically Najib’s situation is untenable,” a member of the Mahathir faction said. “Certainly he will fight back but whether he resigns or not point is he is he cannot function as PM.”The vehicle for his surrogates’ attack on Najib is 1MDB, the five-year-old state investment fund which as of March had amassed debts of RM49.1 billion (US$14.04 billion) against assets of RM51.4 billion, registering losses of Malaysian ringgit 63.5 billion at the end of the quarter, mainly on huge finance costs.
Mahathir and his allies have been dissatisfied with Najib’s performance for more than two years over a wide range of other issues as well, however. The 1MDB issue, described as “the mother of the mother of the mother of all scandals”Khairuddin Abu Hassan, a Penang-based United Malays National Organization Deputy District Chief, filed the request for a “detailed and comprehensive” investigation including the interrogation of 1MDB’s board of directors and representatives of any companies that might be implicated.
a fierce debate erupted over how to protect against cyber attacks by Low Taek Jho pro-bloggers.
Low Taek Jho was involved in the press attacks by his paid bloggers against Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad, Datuk Seri Nazir Razak and The Edge publisher Datuk Tong Kooi Ong
1MDB, as the fund is known, had missed a December. 31 payment and is exploring ways to settle with lenders, primarily RHB Bank and Maybank, two of the country’s biggest banks, by the end of January. It is the second time 1MDB has missed a payment. It previously asked Bank Negara Malaysia, the country’s central bank, for a three-month extension on its loan obligations.Recall that 1MDB already extended its RM5.5 billion bridging loan, originally part of a RM6.2 billion loan from Maybank Investment Bank in 2012, multiple times, even delaying its power assets listing due to negotiations on its debt obligations.
Now this begs yet another question: why borrow on such short horizons if the capital is intended for long-term investments? Would it not make more sense to match the repayment timeline with when the returns on investment are expected to flow in?
And unlocking value to the assets 1MDB had acquired, of course, would not be too difficult. Its properties were acquired cheap from the government, after all, and from there it is simply a matter of bringing valuations up to market benchmarks.
As for its power assets, KiniBiz had previously examined why 1MDB grossly overpaid for them, even borrowing money to do so despite having much cash lying around. Now is this prudent investing as 1MDB Chairman Lodin so generously claimed? Hardly. Numbers don’t lie and in 1MDB’s case, red ink remains red however you call it otherwise.
Perhaps 1MDB is revolutionising investment before our very eyes. Maybe there is a deeper wisdom to its strange madness of borrowing at high cost and making low-return investments.
Or maybe, just maybe, 1MDB simply made poor investment choices and consequently lost some RM5 billion over the past few financial years bar paper gains from revaluing its properties.
In which case what 1MDB seems to be saying right now fits right into the first part of the Kübler-Ross’ five stages of grief: denial. And we have not even talked about its losses of up to RM4 billion from its bond mispricing yet…
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