The New Yorker has published an article about the London estate Witanhurst, the largest house in London after Buckingham Palace. Quite possibly the most expensive as well: it is currently valued at $450 million.
The mansion stood there for a full century, owned by a long list of notable people—from English aristocrats to Bashar al-Assad’s family. In 2008 it was sold to an offshore company, and rumors began that the new owner was someone from Russia. The property was attributed both to Putin and to Baturina, but the real owner of the 25-bedroom house remained unknown.
The estate has been under renovation since 2008—they have been adding a conservatory and some kind of underground catacombs with a swimming pool, home theater, servants’ quarters, and so on.
As part of this bit of virtual dacha-hopping (touring country homes online), here’s a look at what the Guryev estate looks like in cross-section:
Judging by the publicly available construction documents, the project is running badly behind schedule. The mansion was supposed to be finished in 2012 and host guests coming to the London Olympics.
The neighbors do not know who the owner is, the local authorities do not know, and thousands of Londoners walk past every day without knowing either. *The New Yorker* carried out an excellent investigation and managed to identify the mansion’s mysterious owner.
Here he is.
Don’t know who this is? We did not recognize him right away either. Yet this man served for 12 (!!!) years as a senator representing Murmansk Region. During those 12 years, Andrei Grigoryevich never once spoke publicly and never gave a single interview, and in 2013 he left the Federation Council (the upper house of Russia’s parliament) because he decided to focus on business again.
Andrei Guryev is considered the owner of PhosAgro, a chemical holding company that produces fertilizers and agrochemicals. Forbes estimates his fortune at $3.5 billion. Guryev holds more than a 70% stake in PhosAgro. Another major shareholder in PhosAgro (around 15%) is Vladimir Litvinenko, rector of the Mining University in St. Petersburg, where Putin defended his candidate dissertation (roughly equivalent to a PhD thesis). He also headed Putin’s St. Petersburg election campaign headquarters over several election cycles.
Guryev guards his family estate carefully. In a country where it is customary to know your neighbors by name—or, if not by name, then at least from the land registry for a couple of pounds—it is genuinely remarkable that for almost seven years no one knew who owned Witanhurst. The *New Yorker* reporter writes that people he spoke to suggested he “pick another story,” while real estate agents said they would “take that information to the grave.”
If *The New Yorker* had not written about it, we would never have learned about the senator’s castle. Our law enforcement agencies obviously have more important things to do than ask questions of a public politician—even a very wealthy one—who invested hundreds of millions of pounds in British real estate through shady offshore companies with nominee owners.
This story also shows just how useless and fictitious the asset declaration procedure for officials really is. In none of the available disclosures do we see his London estate.
Nor do we see another apartment in London which, according to *The New Yorker*, also belongs to a Guryev offshore company.
This is a three-story apartment in one of the city’s luxury residential complexes. It was purchased in 2008 for £7 million. It too is registered to an offshore company from the BVI (British Virgin Islands), located at the same address as the offshore company used for the mansion.
Guryev successfully concealed these two assets. They undoubtedly should have been listed in his disclosures—if not as property he owned outright (since they were held offshore), then certainly as assets in his use. This is not some tiny one-room flat, or even a three-room apartment in the Moscow suburbs registered to a wife; we are talking about half a billion dollars’ worth of assets that we learned about purely by chance, because the senator did not consider it necessary to tell us about them. The obvious question is: if it is so routine and unremarkable to omit one’s own assets from disclosure, how many more castles and apartments do Russian officials still have, and how many more *New Yorkers* will have to be published before we learn what Russian officials really own?
Separately, we would like to note how very приятно it is to come across our old acquaintance and favorite, Andrei Yakunin, in the pages of the magazine.
We wrote about this house belonging to Vladimir Yakunin’s son back in 2013. It turns out he lives quite close to Guryev. Close enough to walk over for five-o’clock tea.