Jho Low: The wild tale of the billionaire fugitive who partied with DiCaprio and ‘scammed’ Hollywood

A bespectacled Malaysian businessman with seemingly infinite wealth and very expensive taste, Jho Low sought to be the life of every party. Not satisfied with merely schmoozing Martin Scorsese by bankrolling The Wolf of Wall Street, this is the man who bought Kim Kardashian a sports car, flew Leonardo DiCaprio and Jamie Foxx to Melbourne and back by private jet to celebrate the New Year’s Eve countdown twice in one night, and reportedly paid Britney Spears $1m to burst out of a cake and sing “Happy Birthday” to him.

Fittingly, Low’s story bears all the twists and turns of a Scorsese flick, albeit one with very real villains and a raft of victims left devastated on the sidelines of the glitz. Dubbed “The Asian Great Gatsby”, Low originally used his private school education to build up a series of increasingly rich and powerful connections in finance and government – including the stepson of Najib Razak, a high-ranking member of the Malaysian government who would go on to become prime minister of the country in 2009. These would be the kinds of connections that would allow Low to convince people he was wealthier and more important than he was, even before he had the bank balance to back it up.

He soon took care of that. Between 2009 and 2014, Low and his associates allegedly embezzled an eye-watering $4.5bn from 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB), a sovereign wealth fund established in 2008 with the stated aim of enriching the Malaysian economy. That money was directed into bank accounts all over the world, disguised as legitimate investments. For the company involved in processing some of these transactions, the vast sums of money being spent were starting to raise more than just eyebrows and Martini glasses.

When Xavier André Justo joined the oil production company PetroSaudi in 2010, he knew they had little in the way of assets but an impressive contract with 1MDB. Despite being a director in the company, he would only later learn that the oilfields used to justify much of the money coming in were part of a scam.

Justo left the company in April 2011, and though he had not noticed anything illegal at that point, computer servers provided by a friend in IT later revealed that $1.5bn had been diverted from 1MDB to the company. After meeting with English journalist Clare Rewcastle Brown in Bangkok and blowing the whistle on PetroSaudi, he was arrested on 20 June 2015 and went on to spend 547 days in unimaginable conditions in a Thai prison.

Justo’s story is one of several connected to the 1MDB scandal finally being told in a new feature documentary, Man on the Run. Over Zoom, Justo is quick to downplay any suggestions of heroism. “I’m not doing any of this for personal glory,” he tells me between long draws on a cigarette. “I have a son and I just want him to know the difference between good and bad.”

Part of his experience in that Thai prison, aside from the squalid conditions – sleeping on the floor in a 40-square-metre space, sharing one bucket of water between 50 people in 45-degree heat – involved being forced into false confessions. His son was eight months old at the time and the prospect of him growing up without his father was unbearable.

Even after he was freed in 2016, and even as more journalists took on the story and the truth began to emerge, Justo’s redemption arc wasn’t instantaneous. “Now the truth is known and everyone knows who the criminals are and who is innocent,” he says. “But just because people know my innocence doesn’t mean I have an easy life. What I’ve done and the consequences of my actions are still something that I have to live with. If you google my name you will find, let’s say, 95 per cent good things, but still five per cent of people saying: ‘Ah, we never know’... I’ve been fighting for the last five years. I’m quite proud of what I’ve done. And after those five years of fighting, it’s finally giving a nice result for justice.”

With Man on the Run now in cinemas, as well as the release of his own book Rendezvous with Injustice, Justo hopes that more people will see that truth. Nonetheless, for him, the story is far from over. In April, Switzerland’s prosecutor indicted two former PetroSaudi executives for embezzling more than $1bn from 1MDB, and the legal case continues.

Like most people in the US, Cassius Michael Kim’s first exposure to the 1MDB saga was when whispers began surrounding the funding of The Wolf of Wall Street – the now defunct production company Red Granite Pictures diverted funds from 1MDB to help finance the film, along with projects including Dumb and Dumber To and the Will Ferrell comedy Daddy’s Home. “I’m a big fan of Martin Scorsese. So when the movie came out I thought it was fantastic,” the Man on the Run director tells me. “But a year or two later, you start hearing all these rumours about unsavoury financing deals, as well as this dude who’s hanging out with the actors [and] who’s involved in all this shady stuff, and then seeing that unspool in real time in the pages of the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times.”

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As more details began to emerge, and connections began to be forged between the Malaysian PM, the Malaysian wealth fund, and the mysterious playboy who was splashing cash on bottles of Cristal across elite Hollywood parties, Jho Low was starting to attract the wrong kind of attention. In October 2016, Interpol issued a “red notice” warrant to arrest him for his part in the misdirection of 1MDB funds.

Now Low was officially on the run, and while the parties dried up, he didn’t vanish from the world entirely. In 2019, he entered into a settlement with the US government for the resolution of criminal proceedings concerning assets – crucially, though, not the money laundering and bribery charges. Earlier this year, Bradley Hope, the co-author of the book that partially inspired Kim’s documentary, claimed that Low is currently under house arrest in Shanghai. Considering the magnitude of the crimes detailed, the length of his evasion from formal criminal proceedings could transpire to be his last great party trick.

With the abundance of salacious celebrity detail nestled into the 1MDB scandal, alongside the horrendous exploitation of a national wealth fund and the grave injustices wrought upon people like Justo, it is no surprise that a feature documentary has been made about it. It is, somehow, all the fantasies and nightmares of late-stage capitalism rolled into one cautionary tale. For the same reason, it’s vital that anyone wanting to tell the story, like Kim, does it justice.

You can tell he’s certainly thought carefully about it. “You want to be responsible to the people that suffered: the stakeholders. There’s been so much original reporting done, and there’s so many people who have lived this,” he says. “So yeah, of course you want to hook the viewer with some of the salacious stuff, but you don’t want to lose sight of the consequences that real people suffered.” His main mission, he tells me, is to keep it about the people whose lives were impacted by those crimes. “If I could make sure those voices were heard, we’d land in an okay place.”

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Beyond the various threats made against the whistleblowers and journalists involved in breaking this story – Clare Rewcastle Brown was declared an enemy of the Malaysian state in 2016 for her part in publishing Justo’s revelations – it’s vital to remember that it is the everyday citizens of Malaysia who have lost the most. The billions that were stolen, including the countless millions that paid for Low’s high-end lifestyle, didn’t come from nowhere; it was money intended to improve the lives of people in his country of birth. These are the people still paying for one of the biggest financial crimes of the century and they deserve to see those guilty take responsibility.

Perhaps the most astonishing scene in Man on the Run is its interview with Najib Razak while he was still prime minister of Malaysia. Kim is tenacious in the exchange, grilling the leader on how he could have possibly been as naïve to the crimes being committed via the sovereign wealth fund he was directly overseeing. “You can see why people have a hard time believing that,” he tells the PM after one particularly feeble answer.

At the time the interview was shot, Razak was still maintaining his innocence. Even when the PM was on bail, Kim and his crew saw the feverish groundswell of support he drew. “We’re in the streets in Penang and Kuala Lumpur at these business conferences and he is just getting these roaring crowds, this reception that’s beyond belief … It was kind of disheartening, you know?” Several key figures in the fight for justice, including Malaysian politician Tony Pua and attorney general Tommy Thomas, had decided to retire and been ousted from government, respectively. For a while, it felt hopeless.

Then Kim sat down with a man called Anwar Ibrahim, the leader of the opposition at the time, who inspired fresh belief in the director. “He kept insisting to me: ‘No, there’s hope. If you go talk to the people, there’s still a desire for change,’” Kim remembers. “And that day, I remember this shift in my thinking. I was like, ‘Wow, this guy, who has suffered so much, and literally spent 11 or 12 years in prison as a political prisoner, still has hope for his country. Maybe there is hope.’” In August 2022, Razak started a 12-year sentence in prison after his final appeal was lost in the ensuing corruption case. A couple of months later, Ibrahim was elected as the new Prime Minister of Malaysia.

Nonetheless, the story still isn’t neatly wrapped up. Kim tells me about the Korean concept of 아쉽다 (asiuweo), “a combination of nostalgia and regret, like you haven’t really achieved what you fully wanted to achieve”. (A Korean-speaking friend later tells me it isn’t an exclusively profound sentiment – it applies equally well if the local convenience store has sold out of your favourite ice cream.) But Jho Low has never been caught and he can’t be put on trial until he’s on the docket.

“There are so many strands left hanging in the wind, so many people that have not been held accountable,” Kim says. “I have journalist friends who tell me that, even now, with any type of big s****y investment scheme around the world that’s taking place, there’s always gonna be 1MDB money laundered through it, even today. The scope of the initial crime was so vast and so many people profited off it without being held accountable that I don’t think true justice has been achieved. But hopefully, we take incremental steps towards that goal every day.”

Justo tells a similar story about his friends who still work in the world of banking and compliance. “Before opening an account, they will screen you from top to bottom. Do we see any change in the quantity of the crimes? No, they’re just getting bigger! Humans are humans, greed is greed. We have all the tools. We’ve invented zillions of rules and regulations. But if they are not applied, they’re just words.”

If what both men say is true, is there anything to be learnt from the incredible story at the heart of Man on the Run? Or is the moral of the story simply that “greed is greed” and the people who yearn for ever-grander cars, parties, apartments and superyachts are always going to find a way to cheat the system? With Jho Low remaining on the lam from international justice – the man who seemed to hide in plain sight at the centre of this saga for so long – closure remains frustratingly out of reach.

Kim hopes that documentaries like his can make some incremental difference, but knows that the corridors of power in international government remain the key to real change. “Art always has a role to play, but the real reform and the real movement has to come from policymakers and the people who live under those policies. All we can do is hold up a mirror to what’s happened. But I think it is important to lay the truth out so that people can analyse why these things happen – and keep happening.”

‘Man on the Run’ is in cinemas