As football fans wend their way to Stamford Bridge for Chelsea’s home game against Brentford next month, not all will realise they are walking past dozens of apartments belonging to one of Britain’s most valuable private property portfolios.
The sanctioned club owner,Roman Abramovich, and his family have amassed a UK property collection worth more than £250m, numbering about 70 homes, buildings and pieces of land.
The list of assets connected to the oligarch has been compiled by the Russian asset tracker, a partnership involving the Guardian, the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, Süddeutsche Zeitung and other international news organisations that are reporting on the wealth of Russia’s most powerful operators.
It is a snapshot in time, based on information dating from 2020 to the present.
The Guardian, working alongside the campaign group Transparency International, has also seen evidence connecting the billionaire’s companies and relatives to 53 luxury residential properties – plus commercial buildings and plots of land – in central London.
Alongside the oligarch’s widely reported 15-bedroom mansion in Kensington Palace Gardens, bought for £120m, the Abramovich collection includes 42 flats and apartments in Chelsea Village, the hotel and residential complex situated around the football ground, including a $5.5m penthouse apartment overlooking the stadium and a $1m penthouse in the hotel.
Properties owned by the wider Abramovich family include two luxury addresses next door to each other in a square in Belgravia, where the adjacent homes are adorned by neat privet hedges and a flower-filled first-floor balcony.
Less than three miles down the road, near Kensington Palace, the family added to their luxury
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