It’s been described as the most expensive private party ever, with a budget as bottomless as the supply of starry guests was inexhaustible. In a vast circus-style marquee on a five-acre lot in Las Vegas one night in November 2012, Hollywood stars, Middle Eastern princes and Wall Street bank bosses gathered to celebrate the 31st birthday of a flamboyant young man dubbed the Asian Great Gatsby.
He was Jho Low, a Harrow-educated Chinese-Malaysian financier whose name was again making headlines ten days ago following the jailing of a top banker accused of helping him orchestrate a multi-billion dollar international scam whose scope and audacity still almost defies belief.
Not that his 300 guests in 2012 were minded to ask too much about the source of Low’s largesse. The Tinseltown contingent ranged from Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro, Bradley Cooper, Martin Scorsese, Benicio del Toro and Tobey Maguire to rapper Kanye West, his then girlfriend Kim Kardashian, Paris Hilton and Megan Fox.
A giant fake birthday cake was wheeled in and Britney Spears popped out of it wearing a skimpy gold outfit to sing Happy Birthday.
Guests were treated to super-expensive on-tap Cristal champagne – their host’s favourite – served from a 24ft bar carved out of solid ice and handed round by an army of models. The marquee even had a giant ferris wheel, carousel and a nightclub while acrobats soared overhead.
The birthday boy was bestowed with lavish presents he hardly needed – a red Lamborghini from a nightclub, three Ducati motorbikes (from a single guest) and a ribbon-wrapped $2.5million Bugatti Veyron from his brother. Low may have better enjoyed a tipsy DiCaprio lurching on stage to sing with a clutch of rap stars.
But not all the guests were famous. A clutch of money men included Tim Leissner, a German-born investment banker who was one of the stars of financial giant Goldman Sachs.
Leissner was among those close to Low who was less than thrilled that he was flauntinghis vast wealth. For the banker – unlike the likes of Leo, Kanye and Britney – knew where the money came from.
Jho Low, a Harrow-educated Chinese-Malaysian financier, pictured partying with Paris and Nicky Hilton in 2010
Low with Usher — was a fixture on the NYC club scene in the 2010’s by throwing lavish celebrity-filled parties at the cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars
Last month Leissner paid the price for his part in one of the world’s biggest frauds, the ‘1MDB scandal’. Now defunct, 1MDB was Malaysia’s state-owned sovereign wealth fund, from which some $4.5billion was embezzled.
The scam, say US and Malaysian prosecutors, was masterminded by Low, now 43, who had much of the money diverted to offshore bank accounts and shell companies he controlled.
A New York judge jailed Leissner, 53, who once ran Goldman’s South-East Asia operations, for two years. Leissner, who got $60million from the fraud, faced a longer sentence but pleaded guilty and agreed to help prosecutors convict a junior colleague, who was given a ten-year jail sentence in 2023.
The bankers were accused of conspiring to launder money and bribe officials, while Leissner oversaw a $600million payday for Goldman Sachs for helping to raise $6.5billion in funding for 1MDB. As for Low, although he’s been reported sailing in the Arctic and visiting Shanghai Disneyland, he remains a fugitive while ex-Malaysian prime minister Najib Razak, his ‘chief collaborator’, is serving a 12-year prison sentence.
Low has denied criminal wrongdoing and claims Malaysian authorities are engaging in political persecution due to his prior support of the ex-prime minister.
The 1MDB racket also allegedly involved officials in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
Patrick Mahony, a British executive at an oil exploration company, and a colleague were last year jailed by a Swiss court after prosecutors say the ‘obscenely greedy’ pair collaborated with Low to embezzle more than $1.8billion from 1MDB.
Goldman Sachs has denied wrongdoing for years and blamed rogue bankers. However in 2020 it agreed to pay $3.9billion to Malaysian authorities in return for the government dropping criminal charges. Some commentators have said far more senior people at the bank should have been brought to book.
The scandal has exposed the grubby face of international finance as banks, law firms and PR companies – not to mention celebrities – have been accused of cynically and greedily taking the fraudsters’ money while ignoring glaring warning signs that it had been dishonestly obtained.
The 1MDB fund was set up in 2009 by former Malaysian PM Razak with considerable help from Low – who’d met Razak’s stepson when they were studying in London – to pay for infrastructure projects in Malaysia and help turn its capital Kuala Lumpur into an Asian financial hub.
Instead, say prosecutors, the pair used it as their vast personal piggy bank to finance jaw-droppingly extravagant lifestyle, with Low spending more like a trillionaire than a billionaire. It was estimated that in the eight months between October 2009 and June 2010, he and his entourage squandered $85million on alcohol, gambling, private jets, renting superyachts and paying Playboy glamour models and celebrities to party with them.
Initially he set himself up in a $100,000-a-month flat in New York and hired a squad of bodyguards. Low’s spending sprees, each more obscene than the last, soon started making headlines. He reportedly gambled away $2million in ten minutes and, in a year, lost $41million in Las Vegas. Low inevitably earned a reputation as a ‘whale’, or mega spender, in the casino world.
He splashed out on $50,000 champagne without hesitation. He was particularly fond of ‘bottle parades’ – a stream of oversized bottles of champagne brought out by models: on a 2010 nightclub jaunt in St Tropez, he paid some $2.5million for just one parade.
The celebrity world sat up and paid attention. When, again in 2010, Low threw a New York reception for the Malaysian PM’s now-jailed wife Rosmah (whose craving for diamonds and other luxuries soaked up $500million of 1MDB funds), he called on De Niro and Charlize Theron to attend, the pair joining others on stage to sing Michael Jackson’s We Are The World – Low’s favourite.
Low and his cronies also spent more than $200million on art, including paintings by Picasso, Van Gogh, Monet and Warhol.
He forked out $49million for Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Dustheads, a neo-expressionist painting of two drug addicts. He spent hundreds of millions more on jewellery and at least a dozen properties in New York, Los Angeles and London. He also bought a $106million stake in music publisher EMI and a $250million, 300ft yacht Tranquility, plus a $35million Bombardier private jet.
But most startling were the amounts he splurged on ‘buying’ celebrities. For Low was hardly friends with the myriad stars who fawned over him and he had to pay many of them vast sums for the privilege of their company.
US prosecutors have revealed how Low – a pudgy and bespectacled Asian Billy Bunter rather than Jay Gatsby – paid DiCaprio and pouting actress Megan Fox $250,000 each time they came to one of his functions and parties. Socialite Paris Hilton earned $100,000 and Kim Kardashian $50,000 per appearance.
Low bought a $106million stake in music publisher EMI and a $250million, 300ft yacht Tranquility, plus a $35million Bombardier private jet (pictured)
Low gave DiCaprio a $2.5million Picasso, but biggest favour he did DiCaprio was to finance his 2013 film The Wolf Of Wall Street, promising $400million to make the movie
He also paid agents thousands of dollars for ‘model-wrangling’ –finding glamorous women to attend his tacky soirees. Low had a crush on Ms Spears which helps to explain why he reportedly paid her $1million to jump out of his birthday cake in 2012.
Having your favourite blonde pop singer recreate Marilyn Monroe’s birthday tribute to John F Kennedy is one thing. But why was Low so desperate to surround himself with celebrities whose company he knew he’d had to buy?
Associates have described him as a mild-mannered and courteous man who close friends nicknamed ‘Panda’ because of his cuddliness, and believe he primarily saw money as a way of getting close to the rich and famous, and ideally becoming famous himself. He also knew the presence of celebrities and models impressed potential investors and bankers.
He’d always been adept at cultivating the rich and powerful since, aged 16, he was sent to do his A levels at Harrow.
‘That time was very important for me,’ Low reflected in 2010. ‘That’s when I built the core foundation of contacts for the future.’
He and other Harrovians had secret roulette gambling sessions in the school library and Low once procured the letterhead of the Brunei embassy and forged a letter to Chinawhite nightclub in the West End, reserving tables for the Brunei royal family.
The ruse worked and his rich friends were deeply impressed.
Low continued to cause a stir at university, the Wharton business school in Philadelphia, alma mater of Donald Trump. Bankrolled by his father, Low celebrated his 20th birthday with a party in a club where a model in a bikini made of lettuce leaves lay across the bar while guests ate sushi off her.
Low liked to have at least one glamorous female celebrity in tow. One – Australian supermodel Miranda Kerr – even became his girlfriend in 2014. Low offered to help her float her skincare business on the stock market and, over dinner in New York, mutual attraction took its course. He gave her $8million of pink diamond jewellery for Valentine’s Day and a see-through grand piano.
The owlish and shy Low was always a sucker for an attractive woman, first making headlines by sending 23 bottles of Cristal champagne to Lindsay Lohan’s table at a Manhattan nightclub for her belated 23rd birthday and, on another occasion, telling Kim Kardashian she could keep his $275,000 casino winnings.
Jamie Foxx, a veteran of Low parties, told how Low saw in the New Year in 2013 by taking Foxx, DiCaprio and fellow actor Jonah Hill on a private jet to Australia. They partied there for a few hours before flying back to celebrate the New Year again in Las Vegas.
How such a carbon footprint squared with DiCaprio’s passion for the environment is unclear.
US prosecutors have revealed how socialite Paris Hilton earned $100,000 per appearance, Low pictured with Paris on a boat in July 2010
Low when he was 16 and attending Harrow for his A Levels (Left), the financier pictured in 2015 (right)
At the 2022 trial of Goldman Sachs banker Roger Ng, the jury was shown a contract that stipulated that DiCaprio be flown in an ‘exclusive private plane’ to celebrate Low’s November 2009 birthday at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas – on top of the $150,000 appearance fee he was getting.
Billion Dollar Whale, a 2018 book by two Wall Street Journal reporters who investigated 1MDB, told how DiCaprio joined Low at another Vegas party the previous month, which the latter arranged three weeks after removing $700million from the 1MDB fund.
The pair and other Low associates were reportedly joined by 20 Playboy Playmate models in a $25,000-a night hotel suite for a high-stakes baccarat session.
As the players started throwing $5,000 gambling chips around the room, some of the girls scrabbled on their knees to pick them up.
Low also gave DiCaprio a $2.5million Picasso and splashed out $600,000 to buy him Marlon Brando’s Best Actor Oscar for his 40th birthday.
However, the biggest favour he did DiCaprio was to finance his 2013 film The Wolf Of Wall Street, promising $400million to make the movie (a tale of greed, corruption and excess) and three other big-budget productions.
But Low’s funding of The Wolf Of Wall Street put hounds on his scent. British investigative journalist Clare Rewcastle Brown (sister-in-law of ex-PM Gordon Brown) warned DiCaprio he might be relying on tainted money. The film’s lawyers threatened to sue.
But governments around the world were catching on to the fraud and by late 2016, when Interpol issued a ‘red notice’ at Singapore’s request to locate and arrest Low on money-laundering charges, his high-living days were over. Malaysia also brought criminal charges while US prosecutors brought a civil action, followed in 2018 by money-laundering charges.
After the scandal broke, his celebrity friends handed back many of Low’s big gifts to the Malaysian government.
Wherever he is, and Rewcastle Brown believes he may be dead, Low has left some famous people looking venal and naive.
But the real losers are the people of Malaysia who for all their stolen billions, never got so much as a sip of Cristal champagne.
