By LOUISE STORY and STEPHANIE SAUL. Published by The New York Times on 8 Feb 2015.
In early 2010, a young Malaysian financier named Jho Low began making some very expensive real estate deals in the United States.
First, a shell company connected to Mr. Low, famous back home for partying with the likes of Paris Hilton, purchased a $23.98 million apartment in the Park Laurel condominiums in Manhattan. Three years later, that shell company sold the condo to another shell company, this one controlled by someone even more prominent in Malaysia: the film-producing stepson of the prime minister.
A similar transaction was playing out on the other side of the country. Mr. Low bought a contemporary mansion in Beverly Hills for $17.5 million, then turned around and sold it, once again to the prime minister’s stepson. (Read a summary of this article in Malay.)
Mr. Low also went shopping at the Time Warner Center condominiums overlooking Central Park. He toured a 76th-floor penthouse, once home to the celebrity couple Jay Z and Beyoncé, then in early 2011 used yet another shell company to buy it for $30.55 million, one of the highest prices ever in the building.
At the time, Mr. Low said he represented a group of investors, according to two people with direct knowledge of the transaction. Mr. Low recently told The New York Times that he had not purchased the penthouse for investors, and that it was owned by his family’s trust.
One thing is clear: As with nearly two-thirds of the apartments at the Time Warner Center, a dark-glass symbol of New York’s luxury condominium boom, the people behind Penthouse 76B cannot be found in any public real estate records. The trail ends with Jho Low.
Mr. Low, 33, is a skillful, and more than occasionally flamboyant, iteration of the sort of operative essential to the economy of the global superrich. Just as many of the wealthy use shell companies to keep the movement of money opaque, they also use people like Mr. Low. Whether shopping for new business opportunities or real estate, he has often done so on behalf of investors or, as he likes to say, friends. Whether the money belongs to others or is his own, the lines are frequently blurry, the identity of the buyer elusive.
Mr. Low’s lavish spending has raised eyebrows and questions from Kuala Lumpur to New York, where he has made a boldface name for himself as a “whale” at clubs like the Pink Elephant and 1Oak. The New York Post once called him “the mystery man of city club scene,” adding, “Speculation is brewing over where Low is getting his money from.”
One answer resides at least indirectly in his relationship, going back to his school days in London, with the family of Malaysia’s prime minister, Najib Razak. Mr. Low has played an important role in bringing Middle Eastern money into numerous deals involving the Malaysian government, and he helped set up, and has continued to advise, a Malaysian sovereign wealth fund that the prime minister oversees.
Now, that relationship has become part of an uproar gathering around Mr. Najib and threatening his already shaky hold on power. In Parliament, in political cartoons and in social media, Mr. Najib’s critics tend to argue that he is too close to Mr. Low.
Much of the concern, even in Mr. Najib’s own long-ruling party, involves questions about the Malaysian sovereign wealth fund. More broadly, though, the prime minister’s trappings of wealth and the widely broadcast tales of his wife’s outsize spending — the diamond jewelry, the collection of extravagantly costly Hermès Birkin bags — have become a focus of Malaysians’ rising unease with their government’s institutionalized culture of patronage and graft.
“We are very concerned,” Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah, a member of Malaysian royalty and an independent-minded elder statesman of Mr. Najib’s party, said in an interview in Kuala Lumpur last summer. “We want people of integrity to be up there.”
Increasingly, the glare turns to Mr. Najib’s stepson, Riza Aziz, and so to Mr. Aziz’s friendship with Mr. Low. With Mr. Low’s help, Mr. Aziz runs a Hollywood company that produced the films “The Wolf of Wall Street” and “Dumb and Dumber To.” He has spent tens of millions more on the homes in Manhattan and Beverly Hills, transactions that involved Mr. Low, The Times found.
“That’s a lot of money,” Sivarasa Rasiah, an opposition lawmaker, said of Mr. Aziz’s spending. He added, “Every U.S. report on him talks about family wealth. Family who?”
While Mr. Aziz has previously said he is personally wealthy, he declined to explain how he had acquired his money. Mr. Najib’s office, in a statement, said, “The prime minister does not track how much Mr. Aziz earns or how such earnings are reinvested.” As for the prime minister himself, the statement said he had “received inheritance.”
In a statement provided by a spokesman, Mr. Low, whose full name is Low Taek Jho, said he “is a friend of Mr. Riza Aziz and his family.” His real estate transactions with Mr. Aziz were made “on an arm’s-length basis,” he said, adding that he had never purchased real estate in the United States for the prime minister’s family or “engaged in any wrongful conduct regarding any financial matters for the prime minister and his family.”
At the Time Warner Center, The Times found, the 76th-floor penthouse, purchased through a shell company called 80 Columbus Circle (NYC) L.L.C., is one of at least a dozen that can be traced to people with close ties to current or former high-ranking foreign officials, or to the officials themselves.
According to one member of the condominium board there, while the board understood that the penthouse had been bought for investors, it did not ascertain their identities. At the Park Laurel, where Mr. Najib’s stepson owns, the board did not respond to questions about whether it had examined the financing of the purchase.
In fact, in-depth scrutiny of real estate deals is not required. International anticorruption organizations have criticized this lack of inquiry — not just by real estate brokers and condo boards, but by banks, lawyers and the federal government.
“People should ask the questions, ‘Why is it that this individual is bringing in millions of dollars into America, and how was it acquired?’” said Charmian Gooch, co-founder of Global Witness, a nongovernmental organization that works against corruption around the world.
THE MAKING OF A FINANCIER
To mention Mr. Low in Malaysia is to conjure the image of a baby-faced young man in rimless glasses and a loose black V-neck, holding a magnum of Cristal and surrounded by celebrities. But if he is sometimes derided as a tabloid party boy who once flew a group of bottle girls from New York to Malaysia, the reality is that the clubbing life, for Mr. Low, was actually a way to build a booming business managing money for his friends.
“I think a relationship with an investor is not just about managing their money well,” he said in an extensive interview with The Star, a Malaysian newspaper, in 2010. “Although it is not in my job scope, but if my friend says he wants a flight urgently to somewhere or he wants a dinner reservation at a well-known place, I’ll do my best to make it happen.” He also said, “I am usually the concierge service that arranges everything, and thus my name is all over the place.”
Around George Town, on Penang Island, where Jho grew up, the Lows were seen as a family of somewhat deflated affluence, according to several businessmen who have known them for years. The father, Larry, was an executive for an investment holding company called MWE Holdings, but he split with his partner in the mid-1990s and faded from the local business scene. Still only a teenager, Jho, the youngest of three children, emerged as the family’s best hope for the future.
There was money for education abroad, and in London, while attending the ancient and elite Harrow school, Mr. Low became friends with Mr. Najib’s stepson, Mr. Aziz, who was studying at the London School of Economics. He also grew close to Mr. Aziz’s mother, Rosmah Mansor, who stayed for months at a time in an apartment she kept there.
In college, at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, Mr. Low kept up his ties back home by running a Malaysian student group. But he also came to know the children of prominent Jordanian and Kuwaiti families. Even before graduating, he was managing money for what he later described as “my family and close Middle Eastern and Southeast Asian friends.”
After college, many of his early business deals were based in Malaysia — helping a Kuwaiti bank purchase a high-rise complex called the Oval, and bringing Middle Eastern money into the country to finance a commercial zone in the south and a new financial district in the capital. By 2007, he had formed an investment group that included a Malaysian prince, a Kuwaiti sheikh and a friend from the United Arab Emirates who went on to become ambassador to the United States and Mexico.
Two years later, he was pitching his idea for a Malaysian sovereign wealth fund. His plan was to invest public money for the public good through a fund tied to one of the country’s oil-producing states, and so he began wooing the sultan of Terengganu, who was also Malaysia’s king under the nation’s rotating monarchy.
It was all about making connections, making friends. Success, he told The Star, is “attributable to being at the right place and right time and meeting the right people coupled with a trusting relationship.”
In April 2009, those ingredients all came together for Mr. Low. The stepfather of his friend Mr. Aziz became prime minister of Malaysia.
Mr. Najib, 61, has a deep pedigree in Malaysian politics. His father, Tun Razak, was the country’s second prime minister, in the 1970s. His uncle was its third. His cousin is now defense minister.
Mr. Najib has risen through the political ranks: member of Parliament at 23; chief minister of his home state; minister of education, defense and finance; and deputy prime minister.
The family is tightly intertwined with Malaysia’s leading political party, the United Malays National Organization, whose long hold on power owes much to its close relationship with the country’s business elite. That closeness, in turn, has helped engender a culture of corruption, said Zaid Ibrahim, a former minister of legal affairs and judicial reform who served alongside Mr. Najib. Inflated government contracts are the norm, widely accepted because recipients simply turn around and donate to the party, he said.
“You know why corruption is very high in Malaysia?” he said. “It’s because the party in power is synonymous with the state.”...
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