‘Vaccine Prince’ Adar Poonawalla to Buy £138m Mayfair Mansion

ORIGINAL ARTICLE: ‘Vaccine Prince’ Adar Poonawalla to Buy £138m Mayfair Mansion

India’s billionaire vaccine tycoon Adar Poonawalla will buy a Mayfair mansion for £138 million.

Aberconway House is a huge 1920s property near Hyde Park and will be London’s most expensive home sale of 2023.

The 25,000 square foot property will change hands after a sale was agreed upon by Dominika Kulczyk, the daughter of the late Jan Kulczyk, who was Poland’s richest man.

Aberconway House will be acquired by Serum Life Sciences, a UK subsidiary of the Poonawalla family’s Serum Institute of India.

The £138 million price tag makes Aberconway House the second-most expensive home ever sold in London and the biggest deal of 2023.

The high end of London’s property market is insulated from the impact of higher borrowing costs.

This has slowed the wider UK housing market in 2023 because hardly any buyers rely on mortgages.

Trophy properties in London continue to be attractive to international buyers even though new transparency measures were introduced to help target Russian money after the war in Ukraine, and the prospect of tax changes if the Labour party wins the next UK general election.

According to a source close to Serum Life Sciences, the Poonawalla family had “no plans” to permanently move to the UK.

Instead, “the house will serve as a base for the company and family when they are in the UK”.

Adar Poonawalla’s deal follows multimillion-pound investments in vaccine research and manufacturing facilities near Oxford.

In 2021, the family pledged £50 million to Oxford University for a new Poonawalla Vaccines Research Building.

The Serum Institute manufactured hundreds of millions of doses of the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine and it is the world’s largest vaccine manufacturer by number of doses produced.

Adar Poonawala became CEO in 2011, taking over from his father Cyrus Poonawalla.

In 2021, he rented the Grade II-listed Aberconway House in for over £50,000 a week.

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

After the sale of Aberconway House, the next largest sale of the year is the £113 million purchase of Hanover Lodge.

Essar Group boss Ravi Ruia’s family office bought the mansion in Regent’s Park, which had been linked to Russian property investor Andrey Goncharenko.

But London’s most expensive house sale was 2-8a Rutland Gate. It was sold in January 2020 by the former Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Sultan bin Abdulaziz for £210 million.

Evergrande founder Hui Ka Yan was later revealed to be the buyer.

The post ‘Vaccine Prince’ Adar Poonawalla to Buy £138m Mayfair Mansion appeared first on DESIblitz.