In a bombshell video leaked yesterday to the Malaysian press, a former Malaysian deputy prime minister appeared to suggest that Prime Minister Najib Razak had admitted to embezzling over 600 million euros in national development funds, an allegation first published last week by the whistleblowing website Sarawak Report.

Malaysia’s government blocked the Sarawak Report on June 20 after the site published findingsthat a bank account belonging to the Prime Minister contained the equivalent of 620 million euros missing from a state development fund, 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB). Sarawak Report is a sister publication of the 2013 International Press Institute (IPI) Free Media Pioneer Award winner, Radio Free Sarawak.

Amid ongoing investigations into the scandal, Prime Minister Razak on Tuesday fired his deputy prime minister, who had openly questioned how the investigation was being handled and who appeared in yesterday’s video, and reshuffled other governmental positions, including by removing several members of a parliamentary committee looking into the affair.

The Ministry of Home Affairs has also suspended two Malaysian newspapers, The Edge Media Group’s The Edge Weekly and The Edge Financial Daily, that reported on the scandal.

IPI spoke by phone with Clare Rewcastle Brown, founder of both Sarawak Report and Radio Free Sarawak, on the Malaysian government’s decision to censor and on reports that she was personally being harassed. Rewcastle Brown, a former journalist with the BBC World Service, accepted the Free Media Pioneer Award on Radio Free Sarawak’s behalf at the 2013 IPI World Congress in Amman, Jordan.

IPI: Is this the first time the Sarawak Report has been censored in Malaysia?

Rewcastle Brown: It’s the first time we’ve been officially censored, although we’ve been hacked and disrupted since the beginning [Ed. Rewcastle Brown founded Sarawak Report and Radio Free Sarawak in 2010]. At the end of last year, some very expensive local jamming equipment was bought [to] disrupt the short wave transmissions locally; it costs millions to buy these things. They seem to have put these disrupters into high population areas in Sarawak. We’ve got various other ways that we’re transmitting. There’s satellite and things like that.

IPI: How would you characterise the Prime Minister’s reaction to your report?

Rewcastle Brown:The Prime Minister launched a form of coup d’état yesterday; what he’s trying to do is cripple all of the various authorities that were investigating this scandal. He’s trying to exert his power, sack everyone who has questioned him, and bring the whole thing to a halt.

It’s an extreme abuse of power. He’s gone and replaced them, all in 24 hours, and all blatantly with the purpose of attempting to stop an investigation into this scandal. “Why?” is the question that the whole of Malaysia is asking. The Prime Minister’s Facebook page has had hundreds of thousands of comments come up on it telling him to resign in the last 24 hours. And of course now everyone’s whatsapping around talking about how they should have a march over this weekend. [The Malaysian government] found [new media] very difficult to control. [The government has] armies of well-paid people who are writing these blogs that support the government and all the rest, and they are getting absolutely nowhere because nobody bothers to read them. They come to me.

IPI: You mentioned that your phone is being bugged, and I read that you are being stalked in London.

Rewcastle Brown: It’s almost unbelievable. There were always people idling in cars outside my house. I’d go out and maybe have a coffee somewhere, I’d come back two hours later, they’d still be idling outside my house. And my neighbours are actually noticing the same thing.

[I had a coffee with] someone who was not a contact or an informant […] and he immediately said, “You are being followed”. We could see the same guys walking past time and again, and one of these guys came up and started photographing us through the window, pretending rather unconvincingly that he was photographing someone else […] The next day there was an article saying that we’d met.

I’m pretty sure that it’s an outfit called Protection Group International, PGI. That’s who I reported because they’re doing work for the Malaysian government openly. They’ve gone on the record saying that they are working for them and discrediting all of my research, alleging it was tampered with, but giving absolutely no evidence for that at all.

IPI: Are you worried that you are in danger and, if so, what steps have to take to protect yourself?

Rewcastle Brown: Not if I stick to London. I think if I got pushed under a bus at this stage it would probably be counter productive for them. I am taking reasonable precautions: I informed the police and so on. I think it’s more designed to intimidate anyone who might want to be in touch with me.

[The Prime Minister] just promoted the [ex-minister of home affairs, now deputy prime minister] who is saying that he is going to get his so-called friends in Scotland Yard [to extradite me]. He has to find a crime that I can be extradited on, and he hasn’t worked that one out yet.

Zahid [the new deputy prime minister] is used to threatening people and getting away with it, because people panic if people as powerful as he is look at them and threaten them. But why should I panic?

IPI: Moving forward, do you plan to continue reporting in Malaysia?

Rewcastle Brown: Obviously. All I’m doing is reporting on what is becoming an increasingly interesting story. A lot of the reporting work has been done. You couldn’t have more detail on the crime, frankly. So, therefore, it really is up to other agencies now to act on what we’ve reported, and the people of Malaysia to decide what they are going to do about the scandal.

On the other hand, which is one of the reasons I am being harassed, clearly there is a hell of a lot more that could come out if it’s not dealt with by the proper channels, and I’ll be looking at that.