SCM Holdings Limited, owned by 53-year-old Ukrainian billionaire Rinat Akhmetov (the richest man in Unkraine), bought a historic French Villa Les Cedres mansion worth € 200,000,000.
The American financial publication Bloomberg could not miss this news, because it was their journalists who inspected this villa two years ago, and they have exclusive pictures of the premises and the house itself.
Mr. Akhmetov’s new property is located on the coast of Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat. This is a resort in southeastern France on the Cape of the Cote d'Azur overlooking the sea (between Nice and Monaco).
It was reported that the mansion was up for sale for €350,000,000. In 2017 this amount earned the house the title of the Most Expensive House on Earth. It is clarified that the seller gave the buyer a discount of about 43%.
The villa was built in 1830 on the territory of Villefranche-sur-Mer. It was acquired 20 years after the construction was complete by David-Desiree Pollone, who soon became mayor of this city. Pollone came from a family of cloth dealers, and successfully married the daughter of a wealthy ship-owner, effectively increasing his wealth. When he passed away in 1904, his heirs sold the Villa to the Belgian King Leopold II. The monarch acquired the estate for his beloved Caroline Delacroix. Leopold and Caroline met in 1899 in Paris, when the monarch was already 65 years old, and she was only 16 years old.
The area of the mansion is 1672 square meters, it has 14 bedrooms, and living rooms, furnished with antique furniture. One can still find artifacts left behind by previous owners: the walls of one of the rooms are covered in silk with the monogram of King Leopold II, the portraits of Caroline Delacroix hang on the walls, the initials of the Marnier family are on the fireplace.
The tree-lined library houses 3,000 books on botany and science, including a 1640 manuscript that is valued at several thousand euros.
Land area - 14 ha. It has gardens, groves and a pool. There are 16,000 species of plants in the garden, many of which are exotic and rare.
