Indian 'vaccine prince' now owner of 'London's most expensive home' (2024)

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An Indian billionaire known as the 'vaccine prince' has agreed to pay around £138million for a Mayfair mansion, becoming London's most expensive home sale of the year.

Adar Poonawalla reached a deal with Dominika Kulczyk, daughter of Poland's richest man Jan Kulczyk, to buy Aberconway House - a 25,000 square foot home from the 1920s near Hyde Park.

The price tag makes the property the second-most expensive home ever sold in London and the biggest deal of the year, according to luxury property agents.

The property will be acquired by Serum Life Sciences, a UK subsidiary of the Poonawalla family's Serum Institute of India, people familiar with the transaction said.

The next largest sale of 2023, according to agents, was the £113million purchase of Hanover Lodge. Essar Group billionaire Ravi Ruia's family office bought the mansion in Regent's Park, which had been linked to Russian property investor Andrey Goncharenko.

The capital's most expensive house sale was 2-8a Rutland Gate, sold in January 2020 by the estate of the former Saudi Arabian crown prince Sultan bin Abdulaziz for a record-breaking £210million to Hui Ka Yan, the founder and chair of Evergrande.

High-end properties in London have remained attractive to international buyers despite new transparency measures brought in to help target Russian money after the war in Ukraine, whilst the rest of the housing market has slowed due to fewer buyers relying on mortgages.

Mr Poonawalla, who took over leadership of the Serum Institute from his father in 2011, rented the Grade II-listed property in 2021 for more than £50,000 a week.

The impressive red-brick residence is named after Henry Duncan McLaren, aka Baron Aberconway, a turn-of-the-century industrialist who built the Grosvenor Square mansion.

According to the Financial Times, the Poonawalla family had 'no plans' to move to the UK permanently, but that 'the house will serve as a base for the company and family when they are in the UK'.

The London deal follows multimillion-pound investments in vaccine research and manufacturing facilities near Oxford by Mr Poonawalla's company.

In 2021, the family pledged £50million to Oxford university for a new Poonawalla Vaccines Research Building, having manufactured hundreds of millions of doses of the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine.

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