Perhaps one of the most visible pieces of Alam’s international portfolio sits at the corner of Jalan Sultan Ismail and Jalan Ampang in the heart of Kuala Lumpur — the Renaissance Kuala Lumpur Hotel and Convention Centre and the adjoining Four Points by Sheraton Kuala Lumpur City Centre.
The walls are closing in on Mohammed Saiful Alam, often referred to as S Alam, the Bangladesh-born Singaporean businessman who built a sprawling, multi-billion-dollar empire stretching from Chittagong to the Mediterranean — much of it, authorities allege, on a foundation of laundered money.
In the span of just two weeks in May, a court froze a luxury residential property in Cyprus he owned together with his wife, a Bangladeshi court sentenced him in absentia to five months’ imprisonment, and investigators in Singapore continued probing a business empire that reportedly exceeds US$1 billion ($1.3 billion) in assets in the city state alone. Now, attention is also turning to two prominent Kuala Lumpur hotels linked to the S Alam Group, of which Alam is the founder and chairman.
