An Afghan media mogul has sold his Greenwich Village townhouse to an heir to a Philippines coconut fortune.
Saad Mohseni founded Tolo TV in 2004, at a time when most Afghans didn’t even have electricity, and grew its parent company, Moby Group, into a multimedia giant. He has unloaded the Morton Street site for $4.8 million, according to a deed that appeared in the city register Thursday.
Saad and his wife, Sarah Takesh, went into contract on the 2,400-square-foot property March 10 and closed May 15, based on the register. In 2012 the couple paid $3.3 million for the four-bedroom, two-and-a-half-bath property between Bleecker Street and Seventh Avenue South, and so appear to have come out ahead in the transaction.
But they initially envisioned a slightly bigger haul. The midblock dwelling, which does not have a stoop as similar properties do and also sports a facade with yellow, not red, bricks, was listed in October 2023 for $5.5 million, according to StreetEasy. In the end, it sold for about 13% less than its original asking price, not the first home to trade below expectations in a post-Covid era dogged by high interest rates.
The buyer, based on a signature on a loan document, is Nicolo Luccini, the founder of an education software firm and a member of the family that controls Peter Paul Philippines, which exports coconut water, coconut oil and, since the 1940s, the dried coconut used in Mounds candy bars. Luccini borrowed $3 million from HSBC Bank for the purchase, the register shows.
Mohseni apparently left New York several years ago and rented out the Morton Street abode before listing it. Zillow shows asking rents of $17,000 and $23,000 a month at different points. Moby Group is based in Dubai.
“We had 40 buyers come in to see the place in a month. It was by far our busiest listing,” said Esther Patten, the Compass agent who marketed the site with broker Justin Rubenstein. Half the buyers were open to using mortgages, she added. “I think buyers are becoming comfortable with the reality of interest rates.”
The son of an Afghan diplomat who left his native country for Australia during the Soviet Union’s invasion in 1979, Mohseni returned for good after the fall of the Taliban in 2002 to build his media empire. The Mohseni family reportedly chipped in $10 million to establish Moby Group, with an additional $2.2 million in seed money coming from the U.S. Agency for International Development, or US AID, the governmental group that billionaire Elon Musk’s bureaucracy-shrinking push essentially dismantled this year.
News Corp. honcho Rupert Murdoch, an apparent friend of Mohseni, is reportedly also a Moby Group investor.
The conglomerate gained early fame with Afghan Star, a localized version of American Idol, but eventually swelled to include radio stations, an ad agency and a music label, as well as a soccer league, the Afghan Premier League.
But there have been recent tweaks. Since the fundamentalist Taliban resumed control of Afghanistan in 2021, Tolo can reportedly no longer show men and women together onscreen.
