I Fear They Want To Make Me The Fall Guy! Hamad Al Wazzan – EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW

• 11 July 2020

At twenty four minutes past ten on Wednesday night the 36 year old Kuwaiti investment advisor, Hamad Al Wazzan, emailed Sarawak Report, with whom he had been corresponding for some weeks, asking to arrange another phone conversation:

“Would tomorrow morning 10am work? I’m hoping I’m okay between now and then, because I’ve thought a lot and want to lay out my thinking. I’ve passed your number to my lawyer so if anyone grabs me between now and then he will be in touch.”

Unfortunately, Hamad turned out not to be OK.  Some three hours later, at 0130 am, state security personnel raided his home and arrested him. According to his family he was then questioned throughout the night at the State Security Headquarters without the presence of his lawyer until 7.00 in the morning.

Sarawak Report had earlier in the day warned Hamad that an arrest warrant had been issued for his high profile client, Sabah Jaber Al-Mubarak Al-Sabah (Sheikh Sabah) and that other persons had been referred to as being also wanted by the authorities. However, Hamad said no one had advised him to report for questioning and was cautiously optimistic.

As of now he remains in custody and has still not been allowed to see his lawyer or any member of his family.  He is due to be presented in court on Sunday morning. “I have not slept and I cannot sleep” his mother, Maggie Al Wazzan has told Sarawak Report.  A teacher, she runs her own pre-school in Kuwait City.

“He has a legal right to a lawyer. He told me he feared that powerful people would try to put the blame for things on him and they are treating him like an enemy of the state. He has been so successful, he graduated from Harvard – there are always people who try to take you down”

Sarawak Report can confirm these fears because last month Hamad reached out following our original exposes over 1MDB money laundering in Kuwait to tell for the first time his side of the story about Jho Low, whom he met at college in the USA. “I have always avoided speaking to the press” he said, explaining that he felt his connections to Jho Low had been exaggerated and the issue should one day ‘go away’.

However, having read the evidence published by Sarawak Report and our interview with the whistleblower Bachar Kiwan, he confessed that he learnt things he hadn’t earlier fully understood about Jho Low’s activities in Kuwait. He told Sarawak Report he wanted to tell his side of the story and over several hours he gave the story of his life and his connections with  the Malaysian entrepreneur he met at Wharton College.

They were once friends, he said, but never business partners or associates.

At the time Al Wazzan asked Sarawak Report not to publish these remarks. He preferred to wait (on his lawyers’ advice) and cooperate with the authorities if required. On the other hand, he admitted to growing fears that given the powerful nature of the people he had been doing business with and had connected to Jho Low he might be the one to end up taking blame for matters beyond his knowledge or control.

“The person I met up with [Jho Low] turned out to be one of the most infamous public person in the 21st century.  He is a sociopath and you don’t see it coming, so he gains your trust. His favourite films were The Count of Monte Cristo and Indecent Proposal, both about the use of money as a blunt instrument to bring about an outcome they desire. Cash is King. Both Najib and Jho, that’s their plaything, the blunt bullet to corrupt everything. He saw I was a vain young man and so he played with that.”

Hamad said he feared he may have been later engaged in certain contracts in Kuwait to take the blame if things went wrong.

Given his now apparent desperate plight Sarawak Report has obtained the consent of his family to release his version of events, which he said were truthfully given to set the record straight.

Jho Low And I – Our Friendship

“The first time I met Jho Low he was wearing a neon yellow jacket – enough to signal in a plane” Hamad recalled when he first spoke to Sarawak Report.  He was a first year student at Wharton College in Pennsylvania and being new from Kuwait said he felt like a “fish out of water”.  Jho was a third year student attending the same International Finance class and they had been brought together as part of a group of four students to work on a shared presentation.

Hamad describes Jho Low as ‘dynamic’ whereas he was a bit of a “workhorse”. The others in the group were a Californian of Korean background and an Indian student – Hamad said it soon became clear that Jho Low would reward them if they did all the work on the project by showing them the good life.

“Jho would invite us around town like for $600 sushi dinner at the Steven Starr Restaurant all the time and wined and dined and talked about how he knew the kids of the Sultan of Brunei and all his other connections. I was 20 years old and I looked up to him. He said he had an office in Malaysia he said he was a partner of the brother of the Defence Minister [Najib Razak] at the time, which was 2004-2005. The brother was Nizam. Wynton Group was his [Jho’s] company”

Hamad explained that by contrast he was from a modest professional family with a father who was a pilot and his mother a former flight attendant. He had worked hard to achieve his grades and visa to the US. It was a sacrifice for his family.

On the other hand Hamad was young and good looking and his name was almost the same as that of a prominent Kuwaiti multi-millionaire businessman. Those who have examined Jho Low’s conman style of operating might not be surprised that he started to ‘play up’ the status of his new student associate.

“We were both swimmers and we used to swim together. Jho was my most accessible example of success in life and he had access to a lot of people. Next he invited us to a casino in Atlantic City and then on trips to New York. It was incredible: he booked hotel rooms at the Four Seasons. He was super-generous and we developed a bond.  After a while for me the whole party thing started to pall but he started to ask if I would like to bring my friends with us as well? A lot of my friends have big last names in Kuwait and he was hoping I think to meet with them. This was around 2005/6″

Al Wazzan says his friends began to enjoy the flamboyant generosity of Jho Low’s all paid for trips to New York nightclubs. The Malaysian was close to two nightclub ‘fixers’ who would make sure his ‘crowd’ were given access and that tabs were picked up at the bar. One was a man called Salleh, originally from Eritrea, who later introduced Jho Low to the Petrosaudi director Tarek Obaid on the same nightclub scene.

Jho Low gave Hamad a book, “The Richest Man In The World” by arms dealer Adnan Kashoggi, whom Jho treated as a role model. “He used to talk about doing deals with Najib. You never knew if what he says was true. He was obsessed with the Kashoggi Chronicles and read it religiously”.

According to Al Wazzan it was Jho’s brother Zhen who was good friends with Najib’s stepson Riza in London and introduced him to the family. “We were very close 2004-2009. He realised I had friends with high profile parents and he was happy to invite my friends and it gave us a sponsor to go out and enjoy New York. It was all very hedonistic and Salleh was there to ‘make everyone’s dream come true’.

Summer 2005 Jho organised a trip to Malaysia all expenses paid.  At that time Hamad got a flavour of how things might not be all they seemed, however. Jho told him he had sure information on the Malaysian stock market and persuaded Hamad to get his parents to lend him £130,000 to invest. It was many years before Hamad managed to get the money back and only after Jho struck gold with 1MDB.

On the last day of the visit to KL, says Hamad, Jho organised a gala dinner and Najib Razak joined them. Hamad’s friend who was from the Kuwait Royal Family was surprised to be treated grandiosely and placed next to Najib with great pretension, whilst Hamad found himself expected to give a speech of thanks extolling all their wonderful hospitality on Genting Island, a cruise and a trip to Singapore. It was all a show to impress everyone concerned.

Jho then left Wharton and returned to Malaysia. After Hamad Al Wazzan later graduated he worked for UBS in New York equity markets until his visa ran out in 2007. In January 2008 he got a job with Rothschild bank as an analyst based in Dubai. Wanting to return to the West he applied early 2009 for a job at JP Morgan in London which he achieved, but it was not due start until early 2010. “I decided to give up my job and take a long summer break before starting”, says Al Wazzan.

It was at that point in the summer of 2009, that he says Jho Low got back in touch, at a time when Hamad was fancy free. “He apologised and said he had my money and would pay me back $175,000. He also invited me to the South of France. He had rented a yacht, The RM Elegance. There were guests like the pop star Usher.”

So, Hamad decided he had nothing to lose and joined the party. After about a week he says Jho suddenly announced that Najib and his family would be arriving to join them in around half an hour’s time. “He always leaves it till the last moment so you don’t process it. He asked me to put on something tidy and come down and help welcome the new Prime Minister onto the yacht. The daughter and Riza were also there, Riza was with his osteopath as he has a bad back”.

Hamad later suspected he had been set up to appear the wealthy host and owner of the yacht.

The party continued to Monaco and St Tropez, says Hamad and then Jho suddenly announced that the bulk of the guests needed to leave for New York but that he continued to have things to do with Najib. “He conducts everything on a need to know basis”. Hamad flew by private jet with Jho Low’s girlfriend and her family entourage, he says, to an enormous flat hired in New York.

Meanwhile, as the world now knows, Jho Low and Najib’s party went on to board a second yacht, the Alfa Nero, where Prince Turki of PetroSaudi took his turn to pose as the owner to close the deal with 1MDB.

Hamad says he continued to go along with the ride over in New York as he felt he “was not spinning out of control because I had a job to go to in February and I was excited to go back to New York.”

“Jho Low called me the ‘It Boy’ and that went to my head. We ended up in a massive rented apartment in the Park Imperial. It was huge, 10 thousand square ft and cost $100,000 a month. With us were Eric Tan, Choh Hun and Jho’s girlfriend Jesslyn and her friend and aunt and sister and kids. I was deeply in and simply not questioning the generosity”

Jho had two nightclub fixers who took care of the group:

“It felt like being in a video game. We went wherever we wanted and never paid a bill. These guys had nightclubs in Los Angeles and Las Vegas as well. Jho Low was gambling. By 2014 he was betting $10 million a hand but at this stage it was $100k a hand. It was like having a parent who is spoiling you. He wanted to completely control me and get me attached to a lifestyle that only he could support so I derived my values from the attention I got living like that.”

Some time in September, says Al Wazzan, things soured. He had met a girlfriend and when Jho suggested that Najib’s daughter Nooryana and Riza should join Hamad for dinner at the New York flat, he brought the girlfriend and sensed the evening was a catastrophe. It seemed that Jho had been building up Al Wazzan as an eligible wealthy partner for Najib’s daughter. Their relationship never quite recovered.

This was all during the late stages of the PetroSaudi deal that was underway, Hamad now observes.  Jho Low was frequently absent doing his own business dealings and Hamad carried on living it up with his new girlfriend and the ‘entourage’ in New York. It was in November that the bottom finally fell out of the relationship, he says, after the party had moved on to a riotous (post-1MDB deal) extended celebration in Las Vegas.

“We were occupying a string of ‘villas’ at Caesar’s Palace each with several bedrooms and an office.” Hamad had left his computer running he says and discovered that someone had taken the opportunity to answer in his name an email from the New York Post enquiring whether it was true that he was the one footing the bill for the ‘Party Whale’ in all the New York nightclubs?

An article duly appeared in the paper identifying him as a multi-millionaire, apparently associated with the rich older Kuwaiti businessman who shares his name, as the one who was funding the ‘Malaysian Man of Mystery’. “I decided I am getting out of here. F*** all of these people” Hamad said. “I was 24 years old and had had my ego lit on fire and pretended to be someone. But I had been part of a huge entourage”

Hamad went back to New York then took himself to London and his new job, where he remained till 2012 and says he had “zero contact” with Jho Low. He then applied to Harvard Business School, starting September 2012 following which he interned at a hedge fund in New York.

‘Old Friend’ Gets Back In Touch

Hamad Al Wazan has told Sarawak Report that Jho Low got back in touch in 2013 to invite him (and his friends) to a birthday bash in Las Vegas. He decided to go and impress his friends – it was a legendary event of excess and they were duly impressed, according to Al Wazan.

In November 2015, Hamad came back to Kuwait and was staying at his family home deciding what next to do. By this time Jho Low had become world famous thanks to the exposes by Sarawak Report into 1MDB. Numerous people in Kuwait had picked up on the earlier news reports about Hamad Al Wazzan, who was soon to be labelled in the book ‘Billion Dollar Whale” as a key associate of Jho Low and also wrongly described as the “son of a construction and energy magnate”. “The authors tried to talk to me many times but I preferred to lie low and hoped this would pass as I had had nothing to do with Jho Low for years and no connections to his business”.

However, at a gathering at a family friend’s house in Kuwait with mainly older people, Hamad says he was enticed into telling anecdotes about the antics and excesses of his notorious former contact. The company were suitably amused and the following day Hamad received a call from one businessman he had met that evening called Bachar Kiwan.

“Bachar is very charming and he invited me to his office. He explained he had a big media operation in the Middle East and also a bank in the Comoros Island. He wanted to know if I could connect him to Jho Low and if Jho might like to buy the bank?  I explained I was not in touch but I had his assistant Catherine’s number. He said he and his partners wanted to sell the bank and if they succeeded through Jho Low he would pay me a commission”

[Kiwan provides a different version of events as to how Jho Low was introduced into Kuwait].

Hamad told Sarawak Report he eventually succeeded in reaching Jho Low and explained he had a contact who was in partnership with the son of the Kuwait prime minister and they were interested in doing business. Jho agreed to come to meet them in Kuwait. Hamad also says he enquired about the stories surrounding 1MDB – “he said it was all fake news’.

Jho Low arrived in Kuwait in his private Bombadier jet in February 2016 and Hamad says there was a pre-call on speaker phone with Bachar Kiwan in advance about connecting with China. Jho Low said he was close to a son of an ‘elder’ in China investing in media and banks and who wanted to meet Sheikh Sabah. Bachar had a power of attorney over Sabah’s affairs, says Hamad.

The party was given VIP treatment at the airport then taken to the Sheraton Hotel. There was a group of Chinese gentlemen included, says Al Wazzan, and Bachar arranged a meeting with the prime minister as well. Photographs show Kiwan and his partners at Al Waseet, Sheikh Sabah and Majd Suleiman together with Jho Low on that visit with Hamad Al Wazzan in attendance (see featured picture).

The next encounter with Jho Low, says Hamad, was when he was invited to join the team from Al Waseet (excluding Bachar Kiwan who had a travel ban owing to outstanding debts) in Shanghai for what was billed as the return event for the memorandums of understanding between the Kuwaitis and Chinese for the proposed ventures being brokered by Jho Low.

Hamad says that by now he had a good relationship also with Bachar Kiwan, whom he describes as someone he looked up to. Kiwan at the time described his partnership with Sheikh Sabah as one between ‘inseparable brothers’ he says. Jho Low had invited him to join the junket and asked him to wear traditional dress and ‘play the part’ for the signing ceremonies in Shanghai.

He says he went along for the ride and on the journey struck up a connection with Sheikh Sabah, exchanging telephone numbers.

It has now been revealed that Jho Low used the Shanghai event (also attended by the Kuwaiti Ambassador and the head of the Kuwait Investment Authority) to facilitate the sale of his New York Park Lane Hotel shareholding to the Chinese Greenland property group by using Al Waseet as the intermediary to disguise his original ownership of the shares.  Given Jho’s toxic status as a wanted fugitive seeking to off-load assets bought with 1MDB stolen funds, Greenland would not buy from him directly:

“It was a free trip on a private jet. It seems like a recurring theme in my life. I feel the biggest idiot, just following a shiny object, but being in the room implicates me. We had a big dinner after the ceremony. Jho Low was there with the Chairman of Greenland Properties Hong Kong, Jho’s brother Zhen and Majd. I was star struck by the level of the people at the Peninsular in Shanghai. We had toured all Greenland’s offices in the morning. I didn’t think anything wrong was going on”

reflects Al Wazzan, who says he understood nothing of the nature of the deal at the time.

Following his return to Kuwait, Hamad Al Wazzan says he then concentrated for several months on putting together his own business raising a $30 million investment fund, which he successfully achieved and planned to manage.  He was in London when he received a call from Bachar Kiwan in May to confirm that he had achieved the sale of the Comoros Bank to a contact of Jho Low’s from China and would therefore be happy to pay him his commission – a substantial €1.5 million, according to Al Wazzan.

“I had Sheikh Sabah’s number so I thought this was a good moment to ring and congratulate him on the sale and it turned out he was also in London, so we met at a cafe in Piccadilly. At the meeting the sheikh told me he had not authorised the sale of the bank although he had 100% ownership, so he asked me when I got back to Kuwait to get in touch with his lawyer, Saud Abdulmohsen, and find out what was going on”.

Hamad duly met with the lawyer who immediately suggested both men go to ICBC bank to ask the bank manager to explain the sale.

Prior to that meeting Hamad had met with Bachar Kiwan but rejected the proffered cheque which was made out from the company Comoros Gulf General Trading & Construction Company, on the grounds that this was not from Al Waseet the company that had actually made the sale. The purchaser was an entity called Shine Capital International Limited, apparently based in Hong Kong [Sarawak Report has found no active company of that name in Hong Kong].

“This was two days after I had been alerted by Sabah and I was being paid by a company that was not the one mentioned in the commission agreement I had signed with Bachar Kiwan, which was the owner of the bank”

said Hamad, who says he was by then concerned the deal was a suspicious transaction.

After the visit with Al Sabah’s lawyer to ICBC the Chinese manager rang Bachar Kiwan, who considered himself betrayed by him says Hamad. “In a later call I challenged Bachar Kiwan asking why he had sold a bank which belonged to Sheikh Sabah and he responded that our relationship was over”. 

This dispute also marked the break point of a growing rift between the sheikh and his long term business partner Bachar Kiwan, says Hamad. He has since learnt that they had fallen into a KD10 million debt over a failed government contract and that this had already soured relations between the partners. Kiwan apparently had attempted to sell the bank to resolve these debts, claims Hamad and then quarrelled with Al Sabah over the disposal of that money before it was confiscated anyway to meet the public debts. The two men next quarrelled over the disposal of their businesses, claims Hamad, who therefore believes their issues ran deeper than Jho Low. [Bachar Kiwan explains a somewhat different version of events]

Meanwhile, Hamad says, he was not aware of the subsequent payments sent by Chinese companies to entities owned by Sheikh Sabah and Bachar Kiwan, which Bachar has testified were connected to Malaysian kickbacks orchestrated by Jho Low.

“I learnt this for the first time reading Sarawak Report and it explained a lot to me about what had been going on. The whole Silk Road thing, I didn’t know about it till I was called in to be interviewed by the Ministry of Interior [in 2018]”

I Was Not Jho Low’s Agent In Kuwait

However, given his connections to Jho Low and now the links with the partners at Al Waseet and attendances at some of their business events, Hamad accepts that appearances  could be used to support accusations that he was the ‘link man’ for Jho Low in his dealings with Kuwait.

“I was never working with or for Jho Low” maintains Hamad “I had barely been in touch with him over many years… The last time I spoke to him was on the phone in December 2017 after I met with Zhen in a restaurant in Hong Kong and we called Jho to say hello”.

However, following the fall out over Al Waseet he acknowledges that he did accept offer of employment from Sheikh Sabah.

“He said he owed me for alerting him about the bank and he offered to have me do work for him – investment advice. I thought of him as a very wealthy man who was looking to get investment analysis and he gave me a number of projects (at least 12) which I undertook and he paid me for”.

Al Wazzan has sent Sarawak Report a number of documents that support his description of that relationship, including in depth reports on proposed investments such as a proposed purchase of a major European football club that did not proceed, for which he produced a thousand page report.

Al Wazan also has records of payments received from the Sheikh’s personal account as his client for the jobs performed. He says he was never paid by Jho Low and was not aware the Sheikh was receiving Malaysian money.

Al Mouniratyen International

However, 2nd June Sarawak Report published evidence that shows that Al Wazzan became entangled in one of the accounts later identified by the Kuwait anti-money laundering authorities as being involved in suspicious transactions related to a Malaysian request into 1MDB.

Documents show that the company processed billions in suspicious transactions using money believed to be related to the 1MDB kickbacks orchestrated by Jho Low. The 100% shareholder of the company, opened in November 2016, was Sheikh Sabah, however the co-signatory was Hamad Al Wazzan.

Sarawak Report has reported the accusation that Al Wazzan’s role as signatory was to act as a trusted proxy of his old friend Jho Low. He admits appearances suggest it, but denies that role:

“[Sheikh Sabah] later said, in December 2016, I have started business with all these Chinese companies and set up a trading company and I want you to be a co-signatory. I was receiving lots of investment banking work from him and he wanted an admin person on the Al Mouniratyen account. We would go to the bank together and the bank would show the print out of the contract and he would check. I was following his instructions. I had no control over the incoming money I only signed on the outbound transfers, checking there was sufficient money in the account to make payments and that the terms and charges and currency rates were fair. I was not a signatory on any of the contracts or any of the other companies”

Al Wazzan says he made about 5-6 such trips with Al Sabah to sign transfers at ICBC bank and that he was never provided with documentation or allowed to remove papers from the bank on this account. At the time he says he saw it as part of his series of assignments for Sheikh Sabah, but now he believes he was possibly being used to help create a “plausible deniability” for those engaged in funnelling laundered money. “I can see a case is being made against me” he told Sarawak Report, “but maybe I am paranoid”.

Set Up?

Hamad Al Wazzan has pointed out he received no income from any of the suspicious transactions involving Malaysian money and that he turned down a cheque he felt was dubious from Bachar Kiwan.

However, he told Sarawak Report that he has watched as reports on social media have begun to paint a picture that he was an orchestrator of the scheme and working with Jho Low.

Questioned by the authorities in 2018, along with Sheikh Sabah, he denied all knowledge of such matters and the case was shut. However, speaking to Sarawak Report over a series of discussions in recent days he admits he has come to fear that with the story now in the open he might be the simplest person to blame, whilst more powerful figures remain protected.

Sarawak Report has therefore released Hamad Al Wazzan’s side of the story, as told by him, with the agreement of his family out of concern to have his voice heard against more powerful entities who might seek to lay blame on him, which is not where he claims that it belongs. Meanwhile, the clock ticks he remains incarcerated along with other senior suspects, without a lawyer and without his family knowing how he is.