London: Serum Institute of India (SII) CEO Adar Poonawalla has acquired a sprawling mansion in the heart of London worth around £138 million (Rs 1,444 crore), according to a UK media report on Tuesday.
According to The Financial Times, the Poonawalla family has agreed a deal for the 25,000-square-foot Mayfair mansion near Hyde Park named Aberconway House in what is expected to be the most expensive house sale of the year for the UK capital.
The five-storey property, dating back to the 1920s and Grade II listed, will be acquired by SII's UK subsidiary Serum Life Sciences, people familiar with the transaction told the newspaper.
The sale is said to have been agreed by Dominika Kulczyk, daughter of the late businessman Jan Kulczyk, who was Poland’s richest man.
The red-brick residence is named after Baron Aberconway, Henry Duncan McLaren, a 20th century industrialist who built the Grosvenor Square mansion.
According to sources quoted by the newspaper, while the Poonawalla family did not intend to relocate to the UK, the mansion would “serve as a base for the company and family when they are in the UK”.
It follows multi-million-pound UK investments by the family in vaccine research and manufacturing facilities near Oxford. Back in 2021, Natasha Poonawalla, the wife of Adar Poonawalla and Chair of Serum Life Sciences, had announced plans for a new Poonawalla Vaccines Research Building backed by £50 million funding commitment as part of a partnership with the University of Oxford.
She said at the time: “Vaccines save lives, and the development of vaccines has been the lifelong focus of the Poonawalla family. We are committed to developing and supplying vaccines to people who need them most.
“To make this happen, we build many scientific collaborations with the world’s leading research institutes but today, we are making this keystone donation to give the world-class team at Oxford a brand-new facility from which to take their research to the next level,” she added.
It followed SII’s previous Oxford University collaboration which saw the rapid development and global roll-out of the Oxford-AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine at scale, manufactured and administered in India as Covishield.
Published 12 December 2023, 17:08 IST