QUESTION TIME Out of that RM51 billion of assets that 1MDB has, as much as RM33 billion may never be recovered, allegedly embezzled through a number of crooked deals which no Malaysian authority is investigating at the moment.

And if you include other losses such as mispricing of bonds (RM6 billion), overpayment to advisers (RM2 billion) and overpayment for energy assets (RM3 billion), the figure comes up to an astronomical RM44 billion in losses to the country.

No, these are not crazy figures plucked from the air. Here’s how we derived them...