United Arab Emirates leader buys £65m house in Chelsea
THE leader of the United Arab Emirates has bought a £65m mansion in Chelsea.
A company linked to Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed al-nahyan has bought the west London mansion, which is located on the site of a former telephone exchange and was built with a swimming pool, cinema room and car lift, according to filings seen by Bloomberg.
The deal is one of the biggest home purchases in London since the Covid pandemic. Property prices have taken a hit across many of the capital’s high-end postcodes in response to higher interest rates and taxes.
The purchase in November came at the same time as the UAE attempted a takeover of The Daily Telegraph, The Sunday Telegraph and The Spectator magazine.
Redbird IMI, a fund 75pc backed by Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed al-nahyan, the vice-president of the United Arab Emirates and Sheikh Mohammed’s brother, was poised to take control of the publications in a complex £1.2bn debt deal with the Barclay family. However, the process was derailed last month when the Government pushed through plans to outlaw foreign state control of British newspapers. The legislation explicitly “rules out newspaper and periodical news magazine mergers involving ownership, influence or control by foreign states”.
The Telegraph is currently being run by independent directors.
The Chelsea purchase is one of a few deals to have surpassed the £50m mark in the past few years. Vaccine chief Adar Poonawalla paid £138m for a mansion in Mayfair last year.
However, other deals have come in significantly lower than expected. It emerged last month that the B&M tycoon Bobby Arora sold his London mansion at a 30pc loss, with land registry data suggesting he sold a townhouse in the exclusive Belgravia district for £23.5m in November after buying it for £34m a decade ago.
The slowdown in the luxury property market came as Jeremy Hunt announced plans to scrap the non-dom regime in last month’s Budget.
The Chancellor will instead require foreign nationals living in Britain to pay taxes on overseas income and capital gains after four years of living in the UK.