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.
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Over the summer, former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, who led the country for 22 years and retains considerable influence, publicly denounced Mr. Najib and called on him to reform 1MDB. And while speculation that Mr. Najib would be pushed out at the annual party congress in November proved unfounded, weeks later, an official from his party called for a police investigation of 1MDB and said he would file a complaint against the prime minister if no action was taken.
In January, 1MDB officials responded to the controversy by appointing a new president, a banker named Arul Kanda. The appointment created its own flurry of questions.
In 2008, as Mr. Low was working to bring Middle Eastern money to Malaysia, he helped a Malaysian bank, RHB Capital, raise money from the Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank, where Mr. Arul soon became an executive. The next year, Mr. Arul joined a board of RHB.
In mid-January, the Malaysian press reported that Mr. Arul said that any insinuations about connections to “certain individuals” were unfair. “My C.V. should speak for itself,” he said.
Last September, Mr. Najib traveled to the United States for the opening of the United Nations General Assembly. He and his wife usually stay at the Time Warner Center when they are in New York, and they did so this time as well — at the Mandarin Oriental hotel.
Mr. Low was in town, too — for a Social Good Summit sponsored by his foundation, featuring speakers like Melinda Gates, Ed Norton and Alicia Keys — and he and the prime minister engaged in a bit of a pas de deux at the Mandarin Oriental: Mr. Najib arrived in the hotel lobby with his entourage and went upstairs; within minutes, Mr. Low followed for what he later described as a “courtesy social call.” Less than 10 minutes later, the two men came downstairs and took separate exits from the building.
Lately, Mr. Low has been emphasizing that he is investing his family’s money and no longer managing money for investors and friends.
He has been broadening his family’s business portfolio, making high-profile deals with the Abu Dhabi government and other Middle Eastern investors. In 2012, his family joined a group that bought EMI Music Publishing for $2.2 billion, and the next year, it was a principal investor in the $660 million purchase of the Park Lane Hotel in New York.
After portraying himself for years as a friend of people with money — and saying in the 2010 interview with The Star that he came from a “fairly O.K. family” — he has started to say that he was born with it himself. Last fall, he did an interview with The Wall Street Journal, which reported that his grandfather had made a fortune in mining and liquor investments in Thailand. The Journal’s account — which said the Low family had a $1.75 billion fortune and called Mr. Low a “scion” — was immediately picked up in Malaysia.
As befits the modern scion, Mr. Low has lately begun trading in another asset class: contemporary art. His entry into the art market has generated buzz both for his youth and for the fact that he has become such a significant force so fast. Last summer, he made the ARTnews list of the world’s 200 leading private collectors.
The art market is even more opaque than real estate, so that list is based not on actual sales data but on the assessments of people in the industry who know about collectors’ holdings. According to two people familiar with Mr. Low’s activities in the art world, though, he has taken a liking to pop art.
“Inserting a Jho Low at the top of the market — who buys pictures over $20 million, $30 million, $40 million — it swings the market,” one of them said.
To the public, of course, the purchaser is anonymous. But among the purchases Mr. Low has been involved in, they said, are Jean-Michel Basquiat’s “Dustheads,” for $48.8 million.
Asked if his family owned the painting, Mr. Low said he “did not purchase ‘Dustheads’ artwork on behalf of any investor.” Asked about his involvement in the art market, he replied, “The Low family is interested in fine art.”
Louise Story reported from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and Stephanie Saul from New York. Maïa de la Baume contributed reporting from Paris. Masjaliza Hamzah contributed research from Kuala Lumpur.
To contact the reporters, email louise@nytimes.com or sauls@nytimes.com.
Design, graphics and production by Tom Giratikanon, Mika Gröndahl, Josh Keller, Yuliya Parshina-Kottas, Graham Roberts, Shreeya Sinha, Rumsey Taylor and Jeremy White.
A version of this article appears in print on February 9, 2015, on page A1 of the New York edition. Order Reprints| Today’s Paper|Subscribe
