Will retail giants outsmart the online sales tax?

When I worked in the Malaysian capital of Kuala Lumpur long ago, my office looked across Jalan Tun Razak, a boulevard named in honour of the country’s second prime minister and ‘father of development’. This week his son Najib Razak, its sixth prime minister (2009-2018), was convicted of charges relating to the disappearance of $4.5 billion from a sovereign wealth fund called 1MDB which he once controlled. More trials await, but 1MDB may go down not only as the world’s biggest corruption scandal but also the most vulgar — proceeds that might have helped Malaysia’s poor having been frittered on private jets, penthouses, parties in Las Vegas and the financing of The Wolf of Wall Street.

The alleged mastermind of all this, the financier Jho Low by whom Najib claims to have been misled, is still at large. But Goldman Sachs, which reaped $600 million in fees for managing 1MDB’s bond issues, has extricated itself from potential charges by paying $2.5