Deposit On The World's Most Expensive House To Be Donated To Charity

by Deidre Woollard (RSS feed)
Mar 10th 2009 at 7:02AM

The mystery surrounding who might have bought Villa Leopolda continues. The lavish home in Villefranche-sur-Mer, south-eastern France was on the market for a record price of 390 million euros. Last year rumors swirled about the rich Russian who bought the home. We went through a laundry list of billionaires before learning that the most likely candidate was Mikhail Prokhorov, currently Russia's richest man. He denied springing for the home but as my colleague Jared Paul Stern learned last month, Prokhorov reportedly signed a contract on the property and paid a $55 million deposit, but wanted his money back.

The villa's owner, Lily Safra, has no intention of letting that happen and she made it public last week by issuing a press release saying that she would donate money to ten charities using "all proceeds potentially available from a deposit made on the sale of Villa Leopolda, which has now been halted." King's College, London, and Imperial College, London would each receive one million euros neuroscience research. Safra doesn't name who the buyer might have been in the release. The home is no longer on the market which is probably for the best since the list of people with the funds to purchase such a home continues to dwindle.

Tags: lily safra, LilySafra, villa leopolda, VillaLeopolda