Witanhurst, London’s largest private house, was built between 1913 and 1920 on an eleven-acre plot in Highgate, a wealthy hilltop neighborhood north of the city center. First owned by Arthur Crosfield, an English soap magnate, the mansion was designed in the Queen Anne style and contained twenty-five bedrooms, a seventy-foot-long ballroom, and a glass rotunda; the views from its gardens, over Hampstead Heath and across the capital, were among the loveliest in London. For decades, parties at Witanhurst attracted potentates and royals—including, in 1951, Elizabeth, the future Queen.
In May, 2008, I toured Witanhurst with a real-estate agent. There had been no parties there for half a century, and the house had not been occupied regularly since the seventies. The interiors were ravaged: water had leaked through holes in the roof, and, upstairs, the brittle floorboards cracked under our footsteps. The scale of the building lent it a vestigial grandeur, but it felt desolate and Ozymandian. A few weeks later, Witanhurst was sold for fifty million pounds, to a shell company named Safran Holdings Limited, registered in the British Virgin Islands. No further information about the buyers was forthcoming.
In June, 2010, the local council approved plans to redevelop the house and five and a half acres of grounds, maintaining Witanhurst as a “family home.” It was the culmination of a long battle with other Highgate residents, who did not welcome such an ambitious project. Since then, Witanhurst’s old service wing has been demolished and replaced with the so-called Orangery—a three-story Georgian villa designed for “everyday family accommodation.” And beneath the forecourt, in front of the main house, the new owners have built what amounts to an underground village—a basement of more than forty thousand square feet. This basement, which is connected to the Orangery, includes a seventy-foot-long swimming pool, a cinema with a mezzanine, massage rooms, a sauna, a gym, staff quarters, and parking spaces for twenty-five cars. In late 2013, the local council approved plans for a second basement, beneath the gatehouse, which will connect that building to both the main house and the Orangery. Earlier this year, the owners also sought planning permission to extend an underground “servants’ passage.”
When the refurbishment is complete, Witanhurst will have about ninety thousand square feet of interior space, making it the second-largest mansion in the city, after Buckingham Palace. It will likely become the most expensive house in London. In 2006, the Qatari royal family bought Dudley House, on Park Lane, for about forty million pounds; after a renovation, its estimated resale value is two hundred and fifty million pounds. Real-estate agents expect that the completed Witanhurst will be worth three hundred million pounds—about four hundred and fifty million dollars.
If a vast and lavishly appointed house in Manhattan—a palace nearly double the size of the White House—were being redeveloped on the edge of Central Park, New Yorkers would want to know who lived there. Londoners are equally inquisitive, and concerted efforts have been made to uncover the identity of Witanhurst’s owners. Shortly after the house was sold, it became known—from local gossip and publicly accessible planning documents—that Witanhurst belonged to a family from Russia. Several newspapers speculated that the owner was Yelena Baturina, Russia’s richest woman, and the wife of Yury Luzhkov, then the mayor of Moscow. (Luzhkov and Baturina reportedly enriched themselves while he was in office, before Luzhkov clashed with the Russian government; she now lives in London.) Baturina denied owning Witanhurst, and in 2011 she sued the London Sunday Times for publishing an article titled “BUNKER BILLIONAIRESS DIGS DEEP.”
The Baturina lawsuit and the continued secrecy surrounding Witanhurst have intensified the guessing game. Generally, the names of homeowners in Britain are listed in the Land Registry, which can be read for a small fee. But listings for properties owned by offshore companies do not disclose individual beneficiaries. In the British Virgin Islands, records reveal merely the name of the “registered agent” of Safran Holdings—Equity Trust Limited, a local agency that holds several such positions and is connected to the company by name only—and the company’s post-office box, on the island of Tortola.
A recent investigation by the Financial Times found that more than a hundred billion pounds’ worth of real estate in England and Wales is owned by offshore companies. London properties account for two-thirds of that amount. Charles Moore, a former editor of the Telegraph, says that London’s property market has become “a form of legalized international money laundering.” For Highgate residents, however, worries about the lack of transparency in the purchase of Witanhurst have come second to a more English concern. People irritated by the construction noise and the traffic that have blighted their normally quiet neighborhood have no owner to complain to—only managers.
It might have been expected that the identity of Witanhurst’s owners would slip out, given the volume and the scale of work at the site, and the number of contractors involved. (Last year, I met a craftsman who said that he was on one of six teams of carpenters working there.) But few employees are told the owners’ names. Senior contractors who have dealings with the family or their agents have been required to sign confidentiality agreements. Guards protect the property, and cameras monitor the grounds. A woman who knows the owners advised me to “choose another story.” Stephen Lindsay, one of the real-estate agents who sold the house, spoke to me only after I agreed to leave my phone and bag in another room. He then put the family’s lawyer on speakerphone and announced that he would take the secret of Witanhurst’s ownership “to the grave.”
Witanhurst has always been an attractive place to park new money. In 1814, Joseph Crosfield, a twenty-one-year-old chemist, started a soap-and-candles business in Warrington, in the industrial northwest of England. The company was passed down to his son, George, and then to his grandson Arthur. By then, the company—now named Crosfield & Sons—was worth a fortune.
Arthur was no mere businessman: he was the 1905 amateur golf champion of France and a musician who composed many pieces for piano. In 1906, he won the parliamentary seat of Warrington, becoming a Liberal M.P. for four years. He eventually married Domini Elliadi, a fine tennis player who was the daughter of a Greek merchant. (She competed at Wimbledon and once won the Swiss ladies’ title.) In 1911, Arthur sold the family business. With the proceeds, he bought Parkfield, an elegant eighteenth-century house in Highgate.
Highgate had only recently been subsumed by London’s late-Victorian sprawl. Before then, the village of Highgate had abutted the Bishop of London’s hunting grounds to the north and Hampstead Heath to the southwest, and was situated on the main road from London to the North of England. (The notorious highwayman Dick Turpin hid out in a pub, The Flask, which faces Witanhurst.) Because of its elevation and its handsome views, Highgate became a favored place for rich families from London to build summer retreats.
The Crosfields knocked down much of Parkfield and started afresh with a new house and a new name, Witanhurst, which, in Old English, means “Parliament on the Hill.” Arthur commissioned the Scottish architect George Hubbard to design a gigantic new building, and the landscape architect Harold Peto to create a raked Italianate garden. Witanhurst’s décor was formal—walnut wall panels, cornices embellished with gold leaf—but it had some arriviste quirks. In the music room, three ornate crystal chandeliers were reflected in ceiling-height mirrors, giving the effect of endless dazzling light. The house also had three hundred and sixty-five windows—one for each day of the year. Nearly sixty years after the site was sold to the Crosfields, Lady Phyllis Greig, who had grown up at Parkfield, told an interviewer that she was horrified by Witanhurst. “We tried to keep things in scale,” she said. “Not like the present monster.”
If Witanhurst was a means of smoothing the passage of industrial money into English society, it worked. The place was set up to entertain many guests, both indoors and out. Four tennis courts were built on the grounds, and every year the Crosfields hosted a tournament featuring famous players who had recently competed at Wimbledon. The event became a staple of the English “season.” In 1915, Arthur was made a baronet, and Domini became Lady Crosfield. Between 1918 and 1925, Arthur headed a campaign to save the grounds of Kenwood, a beautiful house on Hampstead Heath, from being spoiled by developers. In 1929, he was knighted. Not long afterward, however, Sir Arthur made a bad investment in a Greek mining venture and lost most of his wealth. He died in 1938, when he fell out of the speeding Geneva-Ventimiglia express train, near Toulon, France.
Lady Crosfield’s tennis parties continued after the tragedy, but near the end of her life Witanhurst sank into disrepair. When she died, in 1963, the Crosfields’ only child, Paul, inherited the property, and he struggled to maintain the crumbling mansion. Paul considered several schemes for Witanhurst, including demolition, which prompted a successful public campaign to have the house protected by a government agency. In 1970, Paul sold Witanhurst to Lionel Green, a developer, whose business soon went bust. Banks repossessed Witanhurst, and during the next two decades the property was passed among developers. Proposals for transforming Witanhurst into a hotel or a club or a suite of apartments were quashed by the local council. Meanwhile, parcels of the grounds were sold off.
In 1985, Witanhurst was sold by its latest owners—Noble Investments, a shell company said to be connected to the al-Hasawi family, of Kuwait—to Mounir Developments, a company registered in Panama. The beneficiary of Mounir Developments was later revealed in court to be a branch of the Assads, Syria’s ruling family, that had gone into exile. The Assads eventually tired of the burdensome estate, and in 2005 they put it up for sale. In court, Somar al-Assad—a cousin of Bashar al-Assad, the President of Syria—revealed that he hadn’t spent the night there in eight years.
In 2007, a developer named Marcus Cooper bought the house from the Assads, for thirty-two million pounds. At the time, Witanhurst was so dilapidated that it was the subject of several official complaints from the local council—a significant deterrent to an international buyer. Cooper repaired the house sufficiently to address the complaints and put it back on the market, for seventy-five million pounds. He then hired Glentree Estates and another agency, Knight Frank, to find a buyer for Witanhurst who was wealthy enough to restore the house. In London during the late aughts, two kinds of buyers generally fit that description: billionaires from Russia or from the Middle East. Glentree produced a hardback brochure filled with panoramic photographs and hyperbolic text. Its pitch began with three words: “Dacha. Chateau. Palazzo.”
On June 5, 2008, Grant Alexson, an agent at Knight Frank, made an appointment to visit Witanhurst with Yelena Baturina. (This presumably gave rise to the rumors naming her as the owner.) Baturina arrived at the property with an Englishman who did not reveal his name or occupation to Alexson. Baturina seemed to like the house, but after the tour she communicated through her representative that she would not be making an offer. Four days later, Alexson heard that the house had been sold to Safran Holdings, for fifty million pounds. He had no idea who the buyer was, and Glentree Estates had not shown anyone the house. Clearly, some private deal had been made. Alexson’s agency received a commission, but the secrecy of the deal puzzled him. “It was a very funny business,” he says.
Later, Alexson discovered that his colleague Stephen Lindsay had made the sale without his knowledge. Lindsay now works at a rival agency. He told me, “They came to me through their lawyer. They wanted it to be kept private and confidential. We did the deal, we kept it quiet—end of story.”
Soon after the purchase, Safran Holdings submitted expansion plans to the local council. The plans were initially rejected, and Safran Holdings hired a prominent barrister, Sir Keith Lindblom, to lead an appeal at a public hearing. Lindblom amassed expert witnesses to make the case for a major redevelopment of Witanhurst. An architect insisted that the proposed design would not clash with neighboring properties; a hydrologist allayed fears that basement additions might displace the water table. At the appeal, a planning expert, Caroline Dawson, attempted to alleviate concerns about offshore ownership: “While the applications were made in the name of Safran Holdings, this company represents the Russian family which owns Witanhurst. The company was formed to pursue the restoration of Witanhurst and its reuse by the family.” She also suggested that Witanhurst, “whilst impressive, is not suited to the needs of current everyday living for the only families likely to be its market.” Safran Holdings won its case, and renovations began.
In 2011, Michael Hammerson, a local councillor, complained to the Daily Mail about the changes at Witanhurst, noting, “We don’t want limos with smoked windows and men in dark glasses with bulging breast pockets, and the place surrounded by CCTV. That’s not Highgate.”
In fact, Russian plutocrats own many homes in the area. Alisher Usmanov, Russia’s third-richest man, who founded the mining company Metalloinvest, owns Beechwood, a white stucco Regency villa. On the Bishop’s Avenue, a “billionaires’ row” between Hampstead and Highgate, several large houses are owned by Russians. Andrey Yakunin, the son of Vladimir Yakunin—the boss of Russian Railways, and one of Vladimir Putin’s oldest friends—lives nearby, in a mansion worth four and a half million pounds. Andrey Yakunin’s son, Igor, attended Highgate School, a prestigious private school.
In recent decades, huge amounts of foreign money have poured into London’s most expensive neighborhoods. Henry Pryor, a British real-estate agent who represents many foreign clients, told me that, although Paris and New York have experienced a similar phenomenon, the trend was particularly pronounced in London. Many foreign billionaires, he said, like the fact that London is an English-speaking capital midway between Asia and New York. In recent years, more than seventy per cent of newly built properties in central London have been bought by foreign investors—often for cash. Billionaires, Pryor said, acquire “London property in the same way that they acquire expensive watches or high-powered motorcars.”
Many Londoners wonder whether the influx of rich buyers has provided any benefit to less affluent residents. Chris Hamnett, a professor of geography at King’s College London, has studied the effect of foreign money on the city’s property market, and likens it to a three-bowl fountain of the type often found in London parks. A jet of water fills the topmost and smallest bowl; overflow spills into the middle bowl and, eventually, into the bottom, largest bowl. In Hamnett’s analysis, the constant pump of water is money flowing into the most expensive parts of London. Residents who might have hoped to live in Kensington are priced out, and thus look farther from the center—say, in Islington. Prices then rise in Islington, and people who might have bought property there must look yet farther out. According to the mortgage lender Halifax, house prices in two boroughs of London increased by more than twenty-four per cent last year. “People are being sequentially displaced,” Hamnett said.
There has been some windfall from the foreign-property boom. New laws have increased taxes on high-value houses: if Witanhurst is sold for three hundred million pounds, the buyer will owe about thirty-six million in taxes. And owners of houses that are registered offshore and worth more than twenty million pounds must pay an annual charge of two hundred and eighteen thousand pounds.
London also benefits from the employment of carpenters, interior decorators, and landscape gardeners. The renovation of Witanhurst alone has provided many dozens of people with work. At the end of 2014—a particularly frenzied phase of the renovation—a builder at the site speculated to me that the project was then costing approximately two million pounds a week. Whatever the precise total, the refurbishment project has surely outstripped the initial estimate of thirty-five million pounds. “It is many tens of millions,” one contractor said.
The mayor of London, Boris Johnson, is ambivalent about the rise in foreign-owned property. In a recent radio interview, he said, “The success of London is having the weird effect of making it very hard for Londoners to afford to live there. . . . In assets, there is no question that there is a steady impoverishment of the bourgeoisie, and we need to address it.” However, he did not want to scare off the private jets. “London is to the billionaire as the jungles of Sumatra are to the orangutan,” Johnson said. “We’re proud of that.”
Next door to Witanhurst is The Grove, a row of gorgeous brick houses from the late seventeenth century. The street has always attracted famous residents. Samuel Taylor Coleridge spent his final years in a rented room in No. 3; Kate Moss and her husband, Jamie Hince, now own the entire house. Yehudi Menuhin sold No. 2 to Sting and Trudie Styler. George Michael owns No. 5.
For half a century, Sir Patrick Sergeant and his wife, Gillian, have lived in No. 1, and on a warm fall day last year I visited them. Lady Sergeant is a small, spry woman of eighty-eight. Sir Patrick, who is ninety-one, is a former financial journalist and publisher. The magazine Private Eye once described him as looking like “an ageing matinée idol.” When we met, he apologized that his movement was a little stiff; he had played tennis the previous day. The Sergeants took me into their garden, which borders Witanhurst. Lady Sergeant peered over the fence on tiptoe. Dozens of workers in neon jackets were filing in and out of the mansion. Trucks filled with detritus from the renovation rattled toward the gatehouse and onto the main road. Pneumatic drills clattered.
In 1961, when the Sergeants moved in, Lady Crosfield was still living at Witanhurst. Sir Patrick remembers her as “a delightful old girl—mad about owls and tennis.” She sometimes let the Sergeants play on her courts. After Lady Crosfield died, in 1963, Witanhurst was largely dormant—until, as Sir Patrick put it, “these bloody Russians bought it.”
Sir Patrick used to have an unblighted view across the Heath—essentially, the same view that Coleridge had seen from his second-floor window two centuries earlier. Now the gray-green roof of Witanhurst’s Orangery appears like a hillock at the bottom of the Sergeants’ garden. The new building is imposing but not garish: with double-height round arch windows and a shallow roof, it resembles a departmental college library. Nevertheless, the Sergeants consider its location obnoxious and, in 2013, they planted a hedge to block it out.
There was still a spot from where you could see past the Orangery and imagine the old panorama. The day I visited, the leaves of the oak trees on the Heath were turning, and the dense canopy of treetops shone green, russet, and yellow. Sir Patrick, holding my hand to keep his balance, said, “It used to be a beautiful view.” The Sergeants believe that the proceedings next door have knocked about a million pounds off the value of their house. They may be right. Kate Moss and Jamie Hince’s house, which is similar to No. 1, was bought in 2011 for more than seven million pounds.
Sir Patrick told me that the current rumor in Highgate was that the house belonged to Vladimir Putin, although he was skeptical. I asked Lady Sergeant whether she had ever been given any clues about the identity of her neighbors. “Never!” she said, over the hammering of the construction crews. Then, in as rueful a tone as the noise allowed, she added, “Why have we had to put up with this for five years?” At that point, the Sergeants decided not to ruin a fine day. They went inside and poured three glasses of champagne. It was 11:30 A.M.
In June, 2014, I met with Robert Adam, an architect who has designed many large houses. He won the commission to rebuild Witanhurst in 2008, having been interviewed by an agent of the owners. He told me that local opposition to the development was overblown. Property owners had a right to build whatever they pleased, as long as it did not harm anyone else. “Houses are a major expression of people’s status and ambition and dreams,” he added.
Adam, a raffish man in his sixties, is a classical architect who can recite the exact proportions of a Corinthian column. I observed that there was a vogue for digging out enormous basements beneath London properties—creating so-called “iceberg houses”—and asked him if he approved. “I don’t have a problem with people digging a big hole in the ground and living in it,” he said. He could even summon a classical rationale for underground living spaces: “The Romans did it. They had a thing called the cryptoporticus, so you could keep cool in the summer.”
The basements at Witanhurst, Adam conceded, were not about keeping cool. He suggested that the trend of adding basements was connected to “a huge amount of capital coming into London, and not enough land.” But Witanhurst was already big enough to have twenty-five bedrooms. Why the need for so much extra space? “You can’t put the word ‘need’ on this,” Adam said. “The word is ‘want.’ ”
He smiled when I asked about the owners. When he won the commission, the agent who interviewed him said that their identity was a matter of profound secrecy. Adam responded, “Don’t tell me—I’ll just get drunk and tell someone.” Since then, he has had meetings with the owners’ son, but Adam declined to share the name, citing a nondisclosure agreement.
In October, 2008, Philip Masterman was hired as the on-site architect. Looking around Witanhurst, he was taken aback: “It was quite daunting, really, to think that you’re going to have to transform something like that.” He was also surprised by the proposed schedule: the family wanted to move in before the 2012 Summer Olympics. In Masterman’s opinion, this was impossible: the project would take a decade. The planning appeal had been won only in June, 2010. It took a year of excavation and construction just to create the concrete box outlining the main basement. Masterman had built underground spaces for London clients, but this one was “the biggest basement anyone’s really seen.”
Still, the commission was interesting, and so Masterman worked as fast as he could. When the Olympics came and went—with the house still far from finished—Masterman and the manager of the redevelopment project were replaced. Masterman says that the attitude of the family was “They have failed us.”
According to Masterman and others, the interior decoration of the main house is being supervised by the designer Gabhan O’Keeffe, who has worked with a number of wealthy Russians, and is known for his lavish style. Nobody from O’Keeffe’s agency agreed to be interviewed for this article. However, the project manager of Witanhurst, Andrew Hall, said that in the grand rooms of the main house he and his team had created a “continental Baroque interior, with English-eccentricity overtones.” The ceiling in the ballroom is yellow, gold, and blue and took six months to paint and gild. At the end of the ballroom, Hall said, floor-to-ceiling mirrors can fold and slide into pockets, revealing a “receiving room” decorated in aquamarine and white gold.
The landscape architect, Michael Balston, told me, in a telephone interview, that Witanhurst’s owners were “very interested in the combination of statuary, stonework, and water at Versailles.” But Balston would not divulge the family’s identity. “I can’t say a word,” he said, laughing. “There’s a guy standing by me with a gun.”
Most paths leading to the owners of Witanhurst remain carefully obscured, but some bread crumbs have been scattered. Two companies are associated with the property: Witanhurst Construction Management Limited and Witanhurst Interiors Limited. To comply with British law, both list their directors at Companies House, a government registry. Almost all the named directors are British developers or managers with unremarkable histories. But one director of Witanhurst Interiors is Russian: Alexei Motlokhov, a thirty-three-year-old Ph.D. in economics whose dissertation focussed on mineral resources.
In documents filed at Companies House, Motlokhov listed several home addresses, including a triplex apartment at Flagstaff House, a complex on the Thames. Land Registry documents say that it was bought, in 2008, for seven million pounds, and is owned by an offshore company named Flagstaff Investments Group Limited. Coincidentally or not, Flagstaff Investments is registered at the same address where Witanhurst’s owner, Safran Holdings, is listed: Box 438, Road Town, Tortola. (The original name for Safran Holdings, it turns out, was Flagstaff Development Limited.)
It’s not immediately obvious how Alexei Motlokhov, who completed his doctorate in 2006, acquired such an expensive apartment—or why, given his expertise in mineral resources, he is a director of Witanhurst Interiors. However, Motlokhov’s father, Vladimir, works for a giant Russian fertilizer company, PhosAgro, and between 2000 and 2008 Vladimir Motlokhov was also the vice-governor of the Murmansk region, where PhosAgro’s mining operations are based.
The Financial Times has called PhosAgro “a powerful market player with a lot of secrets.” Most of the shares are owned by offshore companies. PhosAgro was formed by executives who had worked at Apatit, a Soviet mining interest; it now owns Apatit as a subsidiary. PhosAgro was first listed on the London Stock Exchange in 2011, and its market capitalization is currently more than five billion dollars.
Neither Motlokhov appears to be a major shareholder in PhosAgro. Where does Alexei Motlokhov’s money come from, then? According to former PhosAgro employees, in 2012 he married a Russian woman named Julia Gurieva. Though Gurieva carefully guards her public profile—her Instagram account, which is protected, has the handle @t_o_p_s_e_c_r_e_t—she is the daughter of Andrey Guryev, one of the founders of PhosAgro. In 2011, when PhosAgro held an initial public offering, the Guryevs were revealed to control the majority of the company’s shares.
Andrey Guryev is Russia’s twenty-eighth-richest man. Forbes lists his personal fortune at some four billion dollars. According to a Web site about Russian real estate, Guryev and his wife, Evgenia, have a large house in a gated community called Forest, in a pine-clad area on the outskirts of Moscow that is favored by oligarchs. Putin’s main residence, which has become the site of most Presidential business, is close by.
Andrey Guryev has never given an interview to the press; though he was a Russian senator for twelve years, he never made a public speech in the Federal Assembly. In the few photographs that circulate, he looks pointedly unglamorous, with an inscrutable expression, a mustache, and mediocre clothes. According to acquaintances, he grew up in Lobnya, a town near Moscow, and became a martial-arts champion as a teen-ager before injuries curtailed his athletic career. His father died when he was young. He and Evgenia attended the same high school.
In 1994, shares in Apatit, which in the Soviet era controlled several enormous phosphate mines, were sold for a bargain price to a company connected to Menatep—the bank controlled by the oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Menatep grew out of Komsomol, the Communist Youth League of the Soviet Union, of which both Khodorkovsky and Guryev were influential members.
Khodorkovsky instructed a management group led by Guryev to run Apatit, with the understanding that Guryev would eventually be given the option of acquiring half of Khodorkovsky’s mining assets. Guryev was a young man with no experience in the mining sector, but he and his managers soon realized that Apatit might not ever be wildly profitable on its own. They decided to buy fertilizer factories, with credit from Menatep, in order to manufacture a finished product that could be sold overseas. The resulting company was PhosAgro.
In 1995, Khodorkovsky acquired the oil-and-gas company Yukos, and soon became the wealthiest man in Russia. In 2003, he and his business partner Platon Lebedev were arrested for fraud and tax evasion. The charges against them were ostensibly connected to Menatep’s acquisition of shares in Apatit but were widely interpreted as punishment: Khodorkovsky had clashed with Putin, publicly accusing one of the Prime Minister’s friends of corruption. The arrests also allowed members of Putin’s clique to seize control of Yukos.
Guryev had been elected to the Russian senate in 2001; as a legislator, he had a level of immunity from the criminal charges faced by Khodorkovsky. At the time of his arrest, Khodorkovsky still owned about fifty per cent of PhosAgro. Guryev decided to purge his company of Khodorkovsky’s money—a wise move if he wanted PhosAgro to continue to prosper in Putin’s Russia.
Early in 2004, Guryev sent a message to Khodorkovsky in prison, stating that Russian prosecutors “would destroy PhosAgro, just as they destroyed Yukos,” unless Khodorkovsky sold his half of the business to Guryev. Khodorkovsky was in no position to negotiate, and he instructed his partners to reach a deal with Guryev. According to several people with knowledge of the transaction, Khodorkovsky sold his shares to Guryev at an extremely low price. A representative for Guryev said that in 2004 “the company was not a valuable enterprise, as there were numerous complaints being made against Apatit.” (Khodorkovsky, who has since become one of Putin’s most prominent critics, and now lives in exile in Switzerland, declined to comment for this story.)
At around the same time, Alexander Gorbachev, Guryev’s friend and a top executive at PhosAgro, was targeted by prosecutors in relation to the acquisition of Apatit, and he left Russia for London. Gorbachev was later granted political asylum in the U.K.; after going into exile, he relinquished his post at PhosAgro.
Guryev had acquired control of the company at a bargain price while two other large stakeholders were sidelined. Since then, he has sought to protect his assets, as all Russian billionaires must, by cultivating the favor of Putin and his circle. In 2011, PhosAgro completed the construction of a fishing lodge in Murmansk, which has since been used by senior government figures, including Dmitri Medvedev. Several years ago, Guryev named Vladimir Litvinenko the chairman of PhosAgro—rewarding him with about ten per cent of the company. Litvinenko is the rector of St. Petersburg Mining Institute, the small university where Putin acquired his Ph.D.—with a thesis later found to have been heavily plagiarized. Both Andrey Guryev and his son, Andrey Guryev, Jr., who is now the C.E.O. of PhosAgro, also received degrees there. Litvinenko was a campaign manager for Putin during the 2000, 2004, and 2012 elections, and remains a close ally. Litvinenko’s stake in PhosAgro has recently risen to nearly fifteen per cent, and has a value of around three-quarters of a billion dollars. A former PhosAgro employee joked to me that Litvinenko was “the richest-in-the-world professor.”
In December, I met a man in central London who knew Andrey Guryev and had witnessed the expansion of his real-estate portfolio. On the condition of anonymity, the man told me that one day in the spring of 2008 Andrey Guryev came to London to view two properties: the triplex apartment on the Thames, a recent purchase, and Witanhurst, a prospective one.
Guryev, accompanied by his wife and his son, first inspected the triplex. They were joined by Alexander Gorbachev and Nikolay Bychkov, who is involved with the Guryevs in freight shipping. Two Mercedeses then drove the party to Witanhurst, where they were met by agents from Knight Frank and the Guryevs’ lawyer, Neil Micklethwaite, who represents many rich Russians.
According to the source I met in central London, when the group entered Witanhurst Andrey Guryev spoke as if the house already belonged to him. It appeared that a verbal deal had been made, and that once the paperwork was complete he would be handed the keys. During the tour, the source said, Andrey Guryev spoke of possibly flipping Witanhurst for profit after a renovation, but he also expressed interest in using it as a private home. Soon afterward, it was decided that at least two generations of the Guryev family would live at Witanhurst. Each would need its own space. This was the genesis of the Orangery. Either Guryev’s son or his daughter could live there with their families.
Four other people independently told me that the Guryev family owns Witanhurst. (On May 21st, Guryev’s spokesman said that Guryev is not the “legal owner” of Witanhurst but a beneficiary of the company that owns the house. However, the spokesman acknowledged, “it was always intended that the mansion would be used for the benefit of the family.”) Why would Andrey Guryev not want the public to know this? In 2008, Guryev was still a Russian legislator, and it appears that by law he should have listed his foreign properties in an official registry. According to records filed with the Russian government, Guryev has never registered a foreign property. (The spokesman says that because his ownership of Witanhurst is indirect he had no obligation to register the property.) Guryev also sails on a super-yacht, named the Alfa Nero, whose retail price is more than a hundred million dollars; the yacht is not declared, either. (The spokesman said that Guryev did not own the yacht but “charters the Alfa Nero on a regular basis.”) In 2013, Russia passed a law making it illegal for politicians to own foreign assets. That year, Guryev left the Russian senate, along with a number of other wealthy men. Putin has been intensifying his “de-offshorization” campaign, and Russia now levies substantial tax penalties on rich citizens who do not repatriate their assets.
If Guryev sidestepped transparency rules, his secrecy may have been prudent. The prosecution of Khodorkovsky haunts other wealthy Russians, and Putin’s government is growing more aggressive toward billionaires who are seen as even slightly disloyal. Last September, Vladimir Yevtushenkov, a Moscow billionaire who had a large stake in the Bashneft oil company, was arrested on charges of money laundering, and his shares were confiscated by the court. (He was released in December, and charges were dropped.) Sergei Pugachev, who was once known as “the Kremlin’s banker”—and who now lives in London, having suffered a similar raid on his assets—has said, “Today in Russia, there is no private property. There are only serfs who belong to Putin.” With the recent collapse of the ruble, PhosAgro is one of the few large companies in Russia to have thrived lately. A large part of its business is exports, so its costs are in rubles and its payments in dollars. Such success might make Guryev’s company a fresh target.
On a recent trip to Moscow, I met Guryev’s former business associate Sergey Fedorov. A talkative, ursine man of sixty-one, Fedorov told me that he began working at Apatit’s mines in 1976. Guryev, lacking mining experience, made him part of Apatit’s management team after buying the company, and kept promoting him. In 2001, Fedorov was named the director-general of PhosAgro.
Fedorov became so close to Guryev that they used to go on vacation together. He described his old friend as a complicated, intense man who found public situations stressful, and who had few interests outside business. Although Guryev worked for a long time with speechwriters, Fedorov claimed, he could never break free of his shyness. Guryev liked to ski in the Khibiny Mountains, on the Kola Peninsula, at a ski lodge built by PhosAgro, and when he and Fedorov were drinking they occasionally sang Cossack songs. Guryev is a member of the Orthodox Church, and recently his religious practice has taken on an added fervor. Fedorov said that Guryev wears a large gold cross around his neck and has led several trips to Greece, a center of the Orthodox faith.
In 2004, after Khodorkovsky’s arrest and Guryev’s consolidation of his control over PhosAgro, Fedorov was forced out. He was fired without compensation—and without the many shares in PhosAgro he says he had been promised. (Guryev’s spokesman says that Fedorov “left of his own volition.”) Fedorov told me that whenever he asked for a contract to formalize his compensation Guryev deflected the request by saying, “You don’t trust me or something?” (Two other employees told me that PhosAgro, in its early days, established compensation almost entirely by verbal contracts.)
Igor Sychev, the former head of PhosAgro’s tax department, has a similar grievance with Guryev: he also says that he was promised shares in the company. PhosAgro has denied his complaints, arguing that he signed a release of all claims when he left the company, in 2013. Sychev has known Guryev for two decades, and says that when they first met, in Moscow, Guryev was not given to ostentatious displays of wealth, and lived on Khoroshevskoye Highway, in the same modest building as his driver. One evening when Sychev was staying at the driver’s apartment, Guryev unexpectedly arrived with a bunch of flowers: he had remembered that it was the driver’s wedding anniversary.
Since then, Guryev has become a more remote figure. The other members of his family also guard their privacy. One of the few things known about Evgenia is that she owns a stable of classic and luxury cars. According to a family friend, she drives two Rolls-Royces that used to belong to Elton John. Last summer, she broke several bones when the Mercedes she was driving collided head on with another car, in Rublyovka, an exclusive neighborhood on the western edge of Moscow. This news was hardly reported in Russia.
The only member of the family who has seemed eager to share the details of her life publicly is Valeria, the wife of Andrey Guryev, Jr. Valeria, who studied at the London College of Fashion, is on Facebook, and her banner image shows her posing on a motorcycle in a black miniskirt. In another photograph, she is on a yacht, drinking champagne from the bottle. On Instagram, her avatar bears the slogan “I’m too pretty to work.” On that account, which was recently turned private, she frequently posts professionally shot portraits of herself and her children; in a different set, she poses with a pistol strapped to her bare leg. She has also documented evenings at the Bolshoi; parties at Twiga, a night club in Monte Carlo; and dinners at Per Se, Thomas Keller’s restaurant in New York. Despite this gilded life, very few people in Moscow high society appear to have heard of Valeria Gurieva or her family. Ksenia Solovieva, the editor of Russian Tatler, which assiduously documents the lives of the oligarchs, looked blank when I mentioned Gurieva’s name. “I will put her on my radar,” she said.
It’s hard to square the competing impulses of the Guryevs. They seem to need other people to know they are rich, but only the right people. If the family really wanted to live undetected in London, they could have bought a five-bedroom terrace house in Richmond. Instead, Guryev bought a palace. But, unlike the Crosfields, who built Witanhurst to show off their wealth, the Guryevs are not going to be hosting tennis tournaments. Any social activity is likely to move indoors. The Guryevs seem to want the property to play three roles: refuge, showroom, deposit box. Witanhurst may still look like a grand English estate, but, with so many of its riches buried below the surface, its design is distinctly modern—the architectural embodiment of an offshore account. When the restoration is finished, the Guryevs will be able to arrive in a car with blackened windows, drive into a car elevator, and descend to the parking garage. Their neighbors may never know they are home.
One sunny afternoon this month, I returned to No. 1, The Grove. In the seven years since the purchase of Witanhurst, the Sergeants said, they had never heard anyone mention the Guryev name. Lady Sergeant took me into the garden, where the bluebells were in bloom. At the back of the garden, the hedge that had been planted to block out the Orangery had matured enough to fulfill its purpose. Lady Sergeant squeezed through a slim hole in the hedge, and encouraged me to follow her. We suddenly had an unimpeded view of Witanhurst. The northwestern end of the main house, where a renovated portico could be seen, was almost entirely covered in tarpaulin and scaffolding. To the right of the Orangery, where Lady Crosfield’s gardens and tennis courts had once been, was a regal sequence of stone terraces and balustrades, and hardly any greenery. Down the hill, toward the Heath, a mature oak had been circled in red-and-white tape. It wasn’t clear if the tree was being preserved or had been marked for death. A blue crane steepled over the property. “It is extraordinary,” Lady Sergeant remarked. “It’s like Versailles. Who would want to live at Versailles?” ♦
*Editor’s Note: An earlier version of this article stated, mistakenly, that a mansion owned by Jeffrey Epstein is the largest residential property in Manhattan.
