Jho Low’s Former Beverly Hills Estate Listed at $29 Million
Just days after his gutted Bird Streets mansion finally sold
for $18.5 million — a whopping $20 million loss — another former home of
fugitive financier Jho Low has popped up for sale. This one, a sprawling
mansion located in the ultra-exlusive Trousdale Estates section of Beverly
Hills, is believed to be the first residential property he ever purchased in
Los Angeles. Records show the grant deed was inked in September 2010 for $17.5
million, in the thick of a recession and about a year after the enigmatic Malaysian
playboy first began grabbing headlines in U.S. papers for his spendy ways.
Although it was Low who purchased the property, he may have
never actually lived in this house. According to the New York Times, Low
eventually “sold” — or perhaps gifted — the house to Hollywood producer Riza
Aziz, his close friend and the stepson of Najib Razak, Malaysia’s former prime
minister. Razak is another central figure in the 1MDB scandal, the $4.5 billion
global money laundering scheme that has ensnared everyone from Hollywood
A-listers like Leo DiCaprio, to Goldman Sachs executives and foreign heads of
state. (1MDB has also beget a bestselling book, 2018’s “Billion Dollar Whale.”
But neighbors of the former Low-Aziz house probably know
this place better as “the never-ending construction zone,” because the property
has been undergoing major renovations — off and on — for more than a decade.
Since 2007, the house has been rebuilt at least three times, each time more
lavishly than the last.
Originally built in 1960, the onetime midcentury modern home
was acquired by controversial developer Mohamed Hadid in ’07. Hadid radically
reimagined and expanded the existing house, transforming it into an
Egyptian-themed residential monstrosity that even had a giant pyramid replica
sitting inside.
In 2010, Hadid sold the house to Low, Low subsequently
“sold” the property to Aziz, and the place was torn apart again. By 2014,
photos of the gutted shell of a house were being splashed about online. At some
point, the property was nearly completed, but it wasn’t good enough for Aziz,
so the place was torn down yet again — with more money, presumably, looted from
1MDB.
Aziz never did complete the house. In 2018, under mounting
scrutiny for suspected money laundering, he settled with the U.S. Department of
Justice for $60 million. But the legally-embattled “Wolf of Wall Street”
producer is still facing charges from his native Malaysia. And last November,
with the 1MDB well of funds dried up, Aziz quietly sold the Beverly Hills
mansion for $19 million cash, to members of billionaire Michael Milken’s
immediate family.
Milken, one of L.A.’s wealthiest men and a legendarily successful
1980s financier, received a pardon from President Trump last month for the
prosecution that ultimately sent him to prison for 21 months. Though barred
from working in the securities industry since his 1990 guilty plea, he’s since
become a major philanthropist through his Milken Family Foundation.
In any case, Aziz — or 1MDB — clearly lost a massive amount
of money on the Beverly Hills property. The current listing proclaims that
“over $42 million [was] invested” in the estate, though it’s unclear if that
figure includes Low’s initial $17.5 million purchase. If not, Aziz and Low
could have spent as much as $60 million in laundered 1MDB funds on a property
that would eventually sell for just $19 million, a nearly unfathomable $41
million loss.
Today, the 13,000 sq. ft. manse is finally complete and
offers extravagances that include a guard shack for a full-time security
detail, a lavish screening room and a master suite that wouldn’t look out of
place in a five-star, boutique hotel. The hillside estate sits on more than an
acre of flat property and sprawls across three contiguous parcels of land, two
of them in Beverly Hills proper and one technically in the city of Los Angeles.
In their brief four months of ownership, the Milkens have
put finishing touches on the place and are hoping to flip it at a substantial
profit. Now listed at $28.995 million, the listing boldly swears the ask is
“$10 million under comps” and “the best buy in Beverly Hills.” And indeed, this
is arguably the best neighborhood pocket in Beverly Hills; the lower Trousdale
area is also home to the $72.5 million mansion of Uber co-founder Garrett Camp,
which broke city records last year.
Still, if the property sells for anywhere near its asking
price, the Milkens stand to make a proverbial killing on the place — as much as
$10 million in profit, before the inevitable taxes, maintenance and other
assorted carrying costs are factored into the equation.
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