“There were large requirements and Goldman was one of the few firms, in fact the only firm, that could provide the solution that was required,” 1MDB President Arul Kanda said in an interview Wednesday at his office in Kuala Lumpur. “Overall the objectives were met.” He wouldn’t comment on Leissner.

The bank said last year that fees and commissions “reflected the underwriting risks assumed by Goldman Sachs.” A spokesman for Najib declined to comment for this story. Jho Low didn’t respond to e-mails.

Leissner became the firm’s Southeast Asia chairman in 2014. By then, he had met his current wife in business class on a flight from Hong Kong to Kuala Lumpur, with an argument in the beginning and a marriage proposal by the end, according to an interview they gave to a Wall Street Journal fashion columnist. She was previously married to Russell Simmons, who co-founded Def Jam Recordings.

His wife’s social-media accounts chronicle the couple’s jet-set life, from yachts in the Caribbean to Indonesia, where she thanked god for her police escort. The prime minister and his wife weren’t the only Malaysian leaders she mentioned: The queen, she said, was a fan. In 2014, Simmons told a reporter that one of her daughters wanted to be a banker and met Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein.

$681 Million

Anger about the Wall Street bank’s profit was overshadowed by controversy over whether the money 1MDB raised was spent as intended on local projects including a Kuala Lumpur financial center or siphoned off.

“I am not a thief,” Najib said last July, as investigators probed the hundreds of millions of dollars that were said to have shown up in his bank accounts.

Malaysia’s attorney general said in January that the prime minister got $681 million as a gift from Saudi Arabia’s royal family and returned $620 million. That month, Switzerland’s prosecutors asked for Malaysia’s help investigating 1MDB, saying they suspected $4 billion may have been misappropriated.

Goldman Sachs reviewed the deal too, finding no indication the firm or Leissner engaged in wrongdoing, two people familiar with the process said. Even so, the bank stepped up scrutiny of him after he worked with a group of investors last year trying to buy Newmont Mining Corp.’s Indonesian copper operations.

One of them, Sudjiono Timan, a former head of a government-owned brokerage convicted of corruption in 2004, created a problem. The firm told Leissner it wouldn’t move ahead if he was a sponsor, even though the conviction was overturned in 2013, two people familiar with the matter said. Timan withdrew, but Goldman Sachs pulled out of the deal when it learned he was still an adviser, the people said. The bank then examined Leissner’s messages and found a reference letter he wrote that it said in a regulatory filing was “inaccurate and unauthorized.”