HONG KONG — Goldman Sachs once made a lot of money in Malaysia. Now Malaysia wants some of it back.

The Malaysian government intends to seek restitution from Goldman Sachs, its new finance minister said this week, as it moves to resolve a huge scandal that led to the disappearance of billions of dollars and helped put the country deeply in debt.

That could add significantly to the venerable Wall Street bank’s problems in Malaysia, where it has become ensnared in the scandal. It already faces investigations in the United States and elsewhere related to its activity in the country, where it was once a dominant financial force.

“We intend to seek some claims from them,” Lim Guan Eng, Malaysia’s new finance minister, said in an interview this week in Kuala Lumpur.

The finance minister did not give any details about what kind of claims his government would seek, but he said that the authorities were likely to move cautiously and that the process “will take time.” But he added that Malaysia’s new leaders had reopened communication lines with American authorities that the country’s previous leaders had shut off.