By IANS,
London : Aditya Mittal has been rebuffed after he made an offer of £200 million (nearly $394 million) to buy a house on the exclusive London street where his father, Britain’s richest man, lives, a newspaper reported Sunday.
Father Lakshmi Niwas Mittal, owner of the world’s biggest steel company ArcelorMittal, bought a house on Kensington Palace Gardens in 2004 – a move that made him a neighbour of the Indian High Commissioner.
Now, the Sunday Times reported, 32-year-old Aditya has made an unsolicited offer close to £200 mn (Rs.16 billion) to buy an eight-bedroom house on the same street but has been turned down by the owner.
The astonishingly high offer shows the super-rich is unaffected by the global credit crunch, the paper said.
“Houses are still changing hands for record levels, but most of the time they are so wrapped up in non-disclosure agreements that nobody hears anything about them,” Rupert des Forges, a partner at Knight Frank estate agent told the paper.
Aditya Mittal is also reported to have made an unsuccessful bid for the Nepalese embassy on the same street, which is close to the former residence of Princess Diana.
Aditya Mittal lives in posh Belgravia with his wife Megha, a former Goldman Sachs banker, and their two children.
Jon Hunt, who owns the sought-after house, is founder-owner of the property company Foxtons.
He bought the Grade II listed house in 2005 and has been granted permission to build an underground sports hall with enough room for a tennis court, a swimming pool, gym, sauna, and a ‘car museum’ for his six Ferraris, the paper said.
The residence of the Indian High Commissioner to Britain is at number 9, commonly known as 9 KPG.