Vax king Poonawalla shells out Rs 1,400 crore to snap up London villa

Serum Institute of India chief Adar Poonawalla will pay £138 million (about Rs 1,444 crore) for a Mayfair mansion in London in one of the city’s most expensive home sales of the year, the Financial Times reported on Tuesday.

Aberconway House, a 1920s home near Hyde Park, belonged to Dominika Kulczyk, the daughter of Jan Kulczyk, who was once Poland’s richest man.

Aberconway House is the second-most expensive home ever sold in London, and this is the biggest deal of the year for the city.

Sources said that the mansion will be acquired by Serum Life Sciences, a UK subsidiary of the Poonawalla family’s Serum Institute of India.

Poonawalla has no plans to move to London.

The purchase is said to be the second-most expensive house in London.

“It is a company guest house, which is useful for hosting events, donors, tech partners, and it has helped Serum group in accessing global opportunities that were not possible to do from India,” according to a CNBC TV18 report.

According to sources, the family has no plans to move to the UK and “the house will serve as a base for the company and family when they are in the UK”.

This deal follows multimillion-pound investments in vaccine research and manufacturing facilities near Oxford.

In 2021, the Poonawalla family committed a £50 million ($62.8 million in present value) funding commitment to Oxford University for a new Poonawalla Vaccines Research Building.

Poonawalla, who took over the Serum Institute from his father in 2011, rented the Grade II-listed property in 2021 for more than £50,000 ($62,825) a week.

The mansion is named after Henry Duncan McLaren, Baron Aberconway, an industrialist who built the Grosvenor Square mansion.

The next largest sale of 2023 was the £113 million ($141.99 million) purchase of Hanover Lodge.

Sold in January 2020, London’s most expensive house sale was 2-8a Rutland Gate to the estate of the former Saudi Arabian crown prince Sultan bin Abdulaziz for a record-breaking £210 million ($263.87 million).

London is home to over a dozen Indian billionaires, including G P Hinduja, Lakshmi Mittal, and Sri Prakash Lohia, each of whom has acquired vast mansions at the very top end of the scale.

Hinduja paid £350 million for the Old War Office in Whitehall and later spent £900 million ($1,130 million) renovating the building and converting it into a sumptuous hotel and apartments.

Indian billionaire Ravi Ruia, owner of Essar Group, bought Hanover Lodge in Regent’s Park from Russia’s Andrey Goncharenko for £113 million ($141.99 million).

Steel tycoon Lakshmi Mittal bought a mansion in leafy Kensington Palace Gardens for £117 million ($147.01 million).

Mittal bought this property from Israeli-American financier Noam Gottesman for his son, Aditya.

With inputs from Aneeka Chatterjee

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