PRIME Minister Najib Razak and his high-level entourage to the United States have been feted with VIP treatment, from his historic White House meeting with President Donald Trump down to his stay at the lavish Trump International Hotel, the Washington Post reports.

Najib’s three-day visit to the US has brought at least 24 hours of activity and sales, including the use of meeting rooms, to the glamorous 263-room hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue that Trump owns through a trust.

Yesterday morning, dozens of delegation members convened in meeting rooms with name cards bearing the Malaysian coat of arms. Some attended a white-tablecloth breakfast in the hotel’s Lincoln Library meeting room.

Signs of the Malaysian delegation’s presence were obvious at the property. At lunchtime on Monday, more than a dozen members of Najib’s entourage relaxed in a lounge area reserved for hotel guests. That evening, they came and went from the hotel, sometimes returning to the valet stand with shopping bags, the report said.

Events of this scale would probably mean hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue for the Trump Organisation, based on confirmed spending totals of other groups that have set up camp there.

Trump has come under fire for declining to divest of his interest in the hotel, which is now managed by his sons.

Critics say the hotel creates opportunities for foreign governments and special interests to enrich the president as they try to curry favour with Trump.

The White House has denied having any influence on Najib’s decision to stay at Trump’s hotel.

Press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said she “couldn’t speak to the personal decisions” that Najib and his entourage make in deciding their accommodation.

The Malaysian delegation visiting this week included six other high-ranking officials, according to the Malaysian Embassy, among them the minister of foreign affairs, international trade minister, chief secretary, ambassador to the United States and the director of the nation’s security council.

Najib is scheduled to return home this evening.

Trump’s invitation to Najib also has drawn scathing criticism from US media because the US Department of Justice is conducting a probe – its largest kleptocracy investigation ever – into whether Najib diverted more than US$1 billion from 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB) to his own bank accounts.

The DoJ announced in June that prosecutors had filed forfeiture complaints seeking US$540 million in assets.

US prosecutors a year earlier had filed similar complaints seeking more than US$1 billion in assets that they alleged were ill-gotten gains from an effort by Malaysian officials and their associates to misappropriate money from the government-owned fund.

That means the total value of assets sought stands at nearly US$1.7 billion, the Justice Department said.

Among the assets US officials are seeking to seize are New York City penthouses, Hollywood and Beverly Hills mansions, a private jet and even some future proceeds from the movies The Wolf of Wall Street and Dumb and Dumber To.

The 2016 complaint alleged that more than US$730 million of 1MDB money was ultimately routed to the personal bank account of “Malaysian Official 1”, a thinly veiled reference to Najib.

Members of Najib’s entourage repeatedly declined to answer reporters’ questions on Monday evening and Tuesday morning. – September 13, 2017.