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India’s billionaire “vaccine prince” Adar Poonawalla has agreed to buy a mansion in London for £138mn or Rs 1440 crore, the most expensive home sold this year in London. Aberconway House, a 25,000 square foot Mayfair mansion’s ‘Secret Gardens’, is nearly a century-old and is located near Hyde Park. It is currently owned by Dominika Kulczyk, daughter of the late businessman Jan Kulczyk, who was Poland’s richest man.
The impressive red-brick residence is named after Henry Duncan McLaren, Baron Aberconway, a turn-of-the-century industrialist who built the Grosvenor Square mansion.
The property will be acquired by Serum Life Sciences, a UK subsidiary of the Poonawalla family’s Serum Institute of India. As per reports, the house is meant to serve as a company guest house which is useful for hosting events donors tech partners and will help serum group in accessing global opportunities that were not possible from India.
Earlier this year, Indian billionaire Ravi Ruia, from the Essar Group, bought a Rs 1,200 crore (£113mn) London mansion in Regent’s Park linked to Russian property investor Andrey Goncharenko, in one of the UK capital’s biggest residential deals in recent years.
The Aberconway House deal is said to be the second-most expensive home ever sold in London. The most expensive residential transaction in London occurred in January 2020 when 2-8a Rutland Gate was sold for a record-breaking £210 million to Hui Ka Yan, the founder and chair of Evergrande.
Higher borrowing costs has impacted the UK housing market this year, because few buyers rely on mortgages. But the top end of London’s property market is insulated from this impact.
Trophy 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. And there is also a prospect of tax change if the Labour party wins the next UK general election.
Headquartered in Pune, Serum Institute is the world's biggest producer of vaccines. This London deal follows multimillion-pound investments in vaccine research and manufacturing facilities near Oxford. In 2021, the family pledged £50mn to Oxford university for a new Poonawalla Vaccines Research Building. The Serum Institute manufactures hundreds of millions of doses of the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine.
Adar Poonawalla is the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the Serum Institute of India (SII), a private family-owned business founded in 1966 by his father Dr Cyrus Poonawalla. Adar joined SII in 2001 and he focused on the company’s international market and ensuring new products were licensed and pre-qualified by the World Health Organization for supply to United Nations Agencies including UNICEF and PAHO. He took over from his father as CEO in 2011, taking complete control of day-to-day operations of the company.
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