Wife of former Malaysian prime minister Najib Razak’s spectacular shopping sprees and how a writer set off a media storm by blogging about one
- Little did Patty Huntington realise the backlash she would cause after blogging about Rosmah Mansor buying 61 custom-altered designer garments in Sydney
In May 2018, 12,000 pieces of jewellery, 423 watches and 567 luxury handbags stuffed with almost US$30 million in cash – an estimated haul of US$273 million – were seized by Malaysian police from six properties linked to the family of the later disgraced former Malaysian prime minister Najib Razak.
None of this came as a surprise to the couple’s critics, who had for years levelled allegations of corruption against Najib while documenting Rosmah’s apparent shopping addiction. Any outcries were always thwarted, however, by the couple’s denials and Malaysia’s largely state-controlled mainstream media.
Back in 2012, working away as usual in Australia, I found myself momentarily sucked into the vortex of the duo’s spend-and-spin after yet another lavish Rosmah shopping excursion.
It started with what appeared to be just another pitch from an Australian fashion PR agency seeking publicity for one of its clients. What I thought would be a standard story ended up causing a media blow-up in Malaysia and staunch rebuttals from Rosmah, and as archived by Twitter, at one point Najib personally chimed in to slam my coverage as “a wildly exaggerated story deliberately fabricated to affect people’s perception of their leaders”.
It was January 16, 2012, when Holly Beer, a senior account manager at PR firm Little Hero, shared that Rosmah and her entourage had recently visited the Sydney boutique of one of the agency’s clients: South African-born fashion designer Carl Kapp.
