The Richest King on Earth Let His Brother Spend $15 Billion - Here's How It Ended

Prince Jefri Bolkiah was the younger brother of the richest king on earth - and in barely a decade he spent nearly fifteen billion dollars that had almost never truly belonged to him. This is the story of the tiny, oil-rich sultanate of Brunei, ruled by the same family for more than six hundred years, and of the day its Sultan, Hassanal Bolkiah, handed the keys of the treasury to the person he trusted most in all the world: his own charming little brother. As Finance Minister and head of the secretive Brunei Investment Agency, Jefri answered to no board and no parliament, and no line was ever drawn between the money of the kingdom and the money of the prince. What followed was a spending spree the world had never seen. It began as ambition - the Amedeo company, roads and towers, a resort reportedly finished in twenty-four-karat gold - and then it became something bottomless. More than two thousand cars, most wrapped and never driven. Old-master paintings bought like postcards. The London jeweler Asprey and a string of the grandest hotels on earth. A rug woven of solid gold. By one account in Vanity Fair, at his peak Jefri was spending as much as fifty million dollars in a single month, in a country where ordinary citizens paid no income tax and lived quietly in the shadow of the palace. Then the 1997 Asian financial crisis sent the price of oil through the floor, and for the first time the bottomless treasury had a bottom. An independent audit concluded that around forty billion dollars in "special transfers" had drained from the agency over fifteen years, with roughly fifteen billion flowing to one man. What came next was one of the most extraordinary family wars in the history of wealth - king against prince, fought across the courts of London, New York and the Cayman Islands - a public auction of some ten thousand treasures, and a warrant that turned a prince into a fugitive. And yet, in the end, blood ran thicker than fifteen billion dollars, and the brother who had nearly bankrupted a dynasty was quietly allowed to come home. CHAPTERS 0:00 Plunder Of A Fallen Empire 0:47 The King's Favorite Brother 1:29 A Kingdom Built On Oil 2:58 Keys To The Treasury 3:58 When No One Says No 5:01 Collecting The Whole World 6:07 A Nation Foots The Bill 6:52 Buying The Luxury Empires 8:39 The Treasury Hits Bottom 9:14 Forty Billion Simply Vanished 10:42 Brother Against Brother 11:41 Ten Thousand Treasures Auctioned 13:19 The Prince Who Came Home SOURCES Vanity Fair, "The Prince Who Blew Through Billions" (July 2011) Newsweek, "The Sultan of Brunei's Legal Feud With His Brother" ABC News, "Playboy Prince Loses Expensive Family Feud" Wikipedia: Prince Jefri Bolkiah; Hassanal Bolkiah; Brunei Investment Agency New documentaries on the world's greatest fortunes every week. Subscribe and discover how the richest people who ever lived lost everything. #Brunei #Bolkiah #TheLastHeirs #WealthDocumentary #OldMoney