(Credit: Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images)

His older sister and her kids are at the family’s $31 million Central Park West apartment in New York City, so instead Low and his public relations aide meet FORBES ASIA in the 35th-floor presidential suite at the Park Lane Hotel on Central Park South, acquired in one of the latest real estate deals he’s inked. He wants people to know the real Jho Low his mama’s favorite (he’s the youngest of three), who trained and showed a pet bull terrier as a child.

That year Low and his brother, Szen, set up Hong Kong-registered Jynwel Capital, an advisory firm for the family’s investments. Their dad, Low Hock Peng, or Larry Low, expanded the family’s Asian property holdings to New Zealand, the U.S. Jho Low got his start in real estate deals and leveraged buyouts, bringing in Middle Eastern money from friends he made while at Harrow and then as an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. All this has added to the pile built by the first and second generations Low’s lawyers supplied financial statements to FORBES backing up the $1.8 billion estimate of the family fortune. But because the wealth is widely dispersed the grandfather had 7 children and 15 grandchildren, and there are now more than 50 members of the extended family and is held jointly in various trusts, no individual in the Low family qualifies for our annual list of Malaysia’s richest.

It’s his wheeling and dealing that is putting Low on front pages these days. Now the opposition in Malaysia wants Prime Minister Najib Razak to come clean on his family’s connections to Low and with Low’s dealings with the debt-ridden, state-owned investment fund, 1Malaysia Development Bhd. Low was an advisor to the fund that preceded 1MDB but hasn’t been on the board or in any official position at the new fund.