“The possession would be effected in approximately two months time and shall be utilized for the residence of the Poonawalla family”, he said.
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Although it was biotech major Serum Institute of India that catapulted him onto the billionaires list, Cyrus Poonawalla was born into a family passionately involved in racing and breeding thoroughbred horses.
Poonawalla, who lives in Breach Candy, was searching for bungalow properties including luxury apartments in the same locality for the past two years, before finally zeroing in on this landmark property.
Cyrus Poonawalla, who bought Lincoln House for Rs 750 cr.
1) Kumar Mangalam Birla of the Aditya Birla group bought Jatia House, situated in the Malabar Hill area of Mumbai, for Rs 425 crore last week.
The sale of the Lincoln House in the Breach Candy area of south Mumbai, which used to house the US Consulate, to the billionaire chairman of the Pune-based Serum Institute.
The seaside mansion was originally built in 1938 for the mahraja of Wankaner, a princely state in the center of Gujarat in northwestern India. Even so, Mr Poonawallas deal is almost double the size of any earlier home sale in India, and also follows a string of eye-catching purchases by other prominent industrialists.
The purchase is likely to exacerbate a sense of yawning inequalities in Mumbai, a city where a handful of prominent plutocrats own homes with price tags to rival London or New York, while roughly half of its 21m population still live in slums.It also marks the latest foray into super prime property for the Poonawalla family, which attempted to acquire Londons Grosvenor House hotel previous year.
“We decided to go ahead with the deal given the market conditions and the good price to go with it”, Cyrus’s son Adar Poonawalla told AFP via email. In 2011, the Consulate was shifted to an extensive building in the BKC area.
The aristocrat made a deal with the U.S. government and sold the palace to pay off his taxes following Indian independence in 1947.
In another high profile deal in 2011, the Maheshwari House was sold for Rs 400 crore. 425 crore for Jatia House in the plush Malabar Hill area.
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In 2012, the largest builder in the city, Lodha Group had bought another US Consulate property, the Washington House on the Altamount Road for Rs 341.82 crore.
