With its 25 bedrooms and gold-ceilinged ballroom, Witanhurst is said to be the capital’s second-largest private residence — only Buckingham Palace is bigger.
And as these exclusive aerial photographs taken this week by The Daily Mail show, the £300 million property certainly looks fit for a king. The North London mansion’s lawns have been carefully mown into stripes, its flowerbeds are blooming and the topiary garden is trimmed to perfection.
Even its vegetable plot has been freshly dug and sown. Indeed, thanks to a roster of workers who can be seen during the day there’s not a leaf out of place.
And all despite the fact that Russian oligarch Andrey Guryev, its absent billionaire owner, was sanctioned by the government more than a year ago.
‘We are targeting oligarchs’ private jets, we’ll be targeting their properties, we’ll be targeting other possessions that they have,’ Liz Truss, the then-Foreign Secretary, said at the time. Travel bans were duly imposed and assets frozen — including £2 billion-worth of the capital’s most sought-after real estate. Londongrad, as the capital had been nicknamed, was to be no more.
But 12 months on and questions are being asked as to how effective the clampdown has really been.
While entire Ukrainian towns have been razed to the ground by Vladimir Putin’s murderous troops, as these photographs show, the British homes of Russia’s richest businessmen have never looked better.
Because for all the talk of seizing the properties to fund reconstruction in the war-torn country, the reality is very different.
For starters, even establishing who owns these multi-million-pound mansions is a challenge — the details hidden behind a web of trusts and off-shore companies.
And with none of these properties confiscated, the government finds itself having to allow some of their owners to spend thousands of pounds a month on their upkeep.
While Witanhurst is the most ostentatious example of its kind, a five-minute walk away in Highgate, the £90 million home of Alisher Usmanov is looking in equally good nick.
The ten-acre grounds of Beechwood House, a Grade-II listed mansion, have been manicured and the turning circle on its imposing drive adorned with a central bed of colourful spring flowers. Usmanov, who had links to Arsenal and Everton football clubs and who no longer lives in Britain, has a second property in Surrey.
While entire Ukrainian towns have been razed to the ground by Vladimir Putin’s murderous troops, as these photographs show, the British homes of Russia’s richest businessmen have never looked better.
Because for all the talk of seizing the properties to fund reconstruction in the war-torn country, the reality is very different.
For starters, even establishing who owns these multi-million-pound mansions is a challenge — the details hidden behind a web of trusts and off-shore companies.
And with none of these properties confiscated, the government finds itself having to allow some of their owners to spend thousands of pounds a month on their upkeep.
While Witanhurst is the most ostentatious example of its kind, a five-minute walk away in Highgate, the £90 million home of Alisher Usmanov is looking in equally good nick.
The ten-acre grounds of Beechwood House, a Grade-II listed mansion, have been manicured and the turning circle on its imposing drive adorned with a central bed of colourful spring flowers. Usmanov, who had links to Arsenal and Everton football clubs and who no longer lives in Britain, has a second property in Surrey.
While entire Ukrainian towns have been razed to the ground by Vladimir Putin’s murderous troops, as these photographs show, the British homes of Russia’s richest businessmen have never looked better.
Because for all the talk of seizing the properties to fund reconstruction in the war-torn country, the reality is very different.
For starters, even establishing who owns these multi-million-pound mansions is a challenge — the details hidden behind a web of trusts and off-shore companies.
And with none of these properties confiscated, the government finds itself having to allow some of their owners to spend thousands of pounds a month on their upkeep.
While Witanhurst is the most ostentatious example of its kind, a five-minute walk away in Highgate, the £90 million home of Alisher Usmanov is looking in equally good nick.
The ten-acre grounds of Beechwood House, a Grade-II listed mansion, have been manicured and the turning circle on its imposing drive adorned with a central bed of colourful spring flowers. Usmanov, who had links to Arsenal and Everton football clubs and who no longer lives in Britain, has a second property in Surrey.
‘I can understand if you have a lot of grass to mow then, maybe, £60,000 doesn’t go that far but it still seems quite a lot of money to me,’ says Oliver Bullough, a journalist and author who specialises in writing about financial crime.
The problem facing the Government is that having sanctioned oligarchs’ assets, it either picks up the bill to maintain the properties itself, or allows their owners to do so. Stopping them from spending on the houses could cause them to deteriorate, potentially opening the way to legal action.
And even if the Government had the power to seize them, it would first have to definitively prove who owned them, which in some cases is hidden behind a complex web of trusts and offshore companies.
‘Although the sanctions are presented as a crackdown on kleptocracy and a response to the evil, money-laundering Kremlin, they are not actually a law enforcement tool at all, they are a foreign policy tool that you use against people you disapprove of,’ says Mr Bullough.
‘And the step from freezing someone’s assets to seizing them is colossal. And there is not yet, as far as I know, a single legal process initiated that would take us down that road.’
It is a point echoed by Labour MP Liam Byrne, who warns that allowing oligarchs to continue to enjoy ‘Downton Abbey lifestyles’ means they ‘are laughing at us’.
‘Other countries like Canada are bringing forward serious legislation aimed at not just freezing but seizing these assets,’ he says. ‘The Government seems supremely relaxed about these individuals carrying on in a business-as-usual way. It is extraordinary.’
He is also critical of OFSI’s refusal to reveal the amount of money oligarchs are allowed to spend. ‘How can the House of Commons judge whether sanctions enforcement is working or not if they are keeping as a state secret how much they are licensing each month?’ he says. ‘It could be hundreds of millions for all we know.’
Asked about its approach to issuing licences, a government spokesperson declined to comment on individual cases, telling the Daily Mail: ‘Sanctions and licences are issued according to a transparent legal framework and any UK individual or company found in breach of sanctions could face a heavy fine or imprisonment.’
And he added: ‘In response to Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine, we have introduced the largest and most severe economic sanctions ever imposed on a major economy. We have sanctioned over 1,500 individuals and entities, freezing over £18 billion of assets in the UK.’
Frozen but not yet seized. With the result that, for now at least, some of London’s finest houses — and gardens — continue to have foreign money lavished upon them.
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