The son of an Emirati billionaire dubbed ‘the Donald of Dubai’ is buying one of London’s most expensive mansions for £190million.
Abbas Sajwani – whose father, Hussain Sajwani, is a longtime business partner of Donald Trump – is closing in on a deal to purchase The Holme, which sits alone in four private acres of Regent’s Park.
The 40-bedroom Georgian-Regency villa, hailed by one architectural critic as ‘the definition of Western civilisation’, overlooks expansive lawns that sweep down to the park’s boating lake.
Inside are 29,000 square feet of sumptuous rooms, lavishly decorated with millions of pounds’ worth of gold leaf – creating a look that Mr Trump would surely approve of.
The mega deal comes less than two years after the present owner, who has not been identified, paid £139mn for the 200-year-old residence.
Before that it had been owned by the family of former Saudi defence minister Prince Khaled bin Sultan al-Saud. He bought it for £34million in 1991, before putting it on the market in 2023 when creditors demanded repayment of a loan for a private jet.
The asking price was a record-breaking £250million but nearly two years on it has changed hands for a much-reduced £139million.
The Holme sits alone in four private acres of Regent’s Park, with lawns sweeping down to the boating lake
The Holme was originally built in 1818 and its freehold is still owned by the Crown Estate
Hussain Sajwani pictured at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach last year
Abbas Sajwani is buying the property on behalf of his family, a person familiar with the deal told the FT.
His father Hussain Sajwani is a close ally of Donald Trump, who hailed him as a ‘great investor’ at a press conference last year to announce a $20billion (£15bn) planned investment into US data centres.
The pair have known each other since 2021, when Hussain’s property company partnered with the Trump Organization to build the first Trump-branded golf course in the Middle East.
He has an estimated net worth of $15.3bn (£11.5bn) and has substantial investments in Elon Musk’s SpaceX and xAI.
Abbas Sajwani’s website describes him as ‘the youngest billionaire in global real estate, having built a multibillion-dollar development company in under five years’.
The 26-year-old’s company, AHS Properties is an ‘ultra-luxury’ real estate developer based in Dubai. Last month, it bought Dubai’s Shangri-La five-star hotel for $300m (£228m).
Even at £140m, The Holme would only be the second most expensive home ever sold in the UK, just pipping the £138m paid two years ago for Aberconway House in London’s Mayfair into third place.
Still towering over both is the £205m paid by Chinese tycoon Cheung Chung Kiu to another Saudi royal for the 62,000 square feet of Rutland Gate overlooking Hyde Park in 2020.
His son, Abbas Sajwani, pictured with Donald Trump
The current most expensive home in Britain: Originally built as four separate family houses, the grand seven-storey, stucco-fronted residence runs from 2-8A Rutland Gate, Knightsbridge
The freehold of The Holme is owned by the Crown Estate but the long lease on the Regency masterpiece was sold by the British Government to a Kuwaiti businessman for just £5million in 1984.
Six years later it was in the hands of Prince Khaled, a former Sandhurst graduate and a career soldier in the Saudi Army, before he sold it in 2016.
The following year, Saudi’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin-Salman ordered a crackdown on his sprawling royal family in a purge that landed some of them in jail.
Prince Khaled was not among them, but the crackdown coincided with a ‘massive’ deterioration in his finances and he later sold a £70m home in Paris and two yachts, according to reports at the time.
Sales of high-end houses are usually done discreetly and often through the use of trusts which sometimes obscures the identity of the parties involved.
There are just a handful of families in the world who can afford to buy, refurbish and maintain a mansion like The Holme, which requires a full-time staff of about 20 people.
