The U.S

The U.S. government moved Wednesday to seize more than $1 billion in assets purchased with money that it believes was stolen from a Malaysian sovereign wealth fund by people close to the country’s embattled prime minister

Hidden in the United States in real estate, art and other luxury goods, the money was embezzled from the fund and moved around the world using secretive shell companies that masked its trail, the Justice Department said

The $1 billion that prosecutors say was laundered in the United States is but a portion of the billions that international investigators suspect was siphoned off by high-level officials at the fund and their associates. The fund — called 1Malaysia Development Berhad, or 1MDB — is overseen by the prime minister, Najib Razak

“1MDB was ostensibly created to pursue investment and development projects for the economic benefit of Malaysia and its people, primarily relying on the issuance of various debt securities to fund these projects,” the department said in one of its court filings. “However, over the course of an approximately four-year period, between approximately 2009 and at least 2013, multiple individuals, including public officials and their associates, conspired to fraudulently divert billions of dollars from 1MDB through various means.”

The international inquiries into the sovereign wealth fund began last year after an investigative report in The New York Times. As part of a broader examination of the use of shell companies in high-end real estate in the United States, The Times traced the purchases of about $150 million in residential properties in New York and in the Los Angeles area, as well as several works of art, to relatives or associates of Najib

The Justice Department named three of those people in its filings. One, Riza Aziz, is the stepson of Najib and a Hollywood producer of “The Wolf of Wall Street.” Another, a financier named Jho Low, is a longtime friend of Aziz. The third is Mohamed Badawy al-Husseiny, a former official at a government fund in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, that participated in deals with Malaysia’s fund

The complaint described lavish spending by the people said to be involved in the theft of funds. From October 2009 to June 2010, it said, more than $85 million was spent on gambling in Las Vegas, jet rentals, luxury yachts and payments to other individuals