CEO of Serum Institute Adar Poonawalla purchases London home: Report. The Poonawalla family has reportedly reached an agreement to purchase Aberconway House, a 25,000 square foot Mayfair mansion close to Hyde Park. This is anticipated to be the most costly house sale in the UK capital this year, according to “The Financial Times.”
Adar Poonawalla, the CEO of Serum Institute of India (SII), reportedly paid approximately GBP 138 million for a large mansion in the centre of London, as reported by UK media on Tuesday.
The Poonawalla family has reportedly reached an agreement to purchase Aberconway House, a 25,000 square foot Mayfair mansion close to Hyde Park. This is anticipated to be the most costly house sale in the UK capital this year, according to “The Financial Times.”
According to people familiar with the transaction, SII’s UK subsidiary Serum Life Sciences will purchase the five-story property, which is listed as Grade II and dates back to the 1920s, as reported by the newspaper. Dominika Kulczyk, the late Jan Kulczyk’s daughter and the richest man in Poland, is rumoured to have approved the sale.
The Grosvenor Square mansion was constructed in the 20th century by industrialist Henry Duncan McLaren, a man known as Baron Aberconway, after whom the red-brick residence is named. The mansion would “serve as a base for the company and family when they are in the UK,” according to sources cited by the newspaper, even though the Poonawalla family had no intention of moving to the UK.
It comes after the family invested millions of pounds in vaccine research and manufacturing facilities close to Oxford in the UK. As part of a collaboration with the University of Oxford, Natasha Poonawalla, the wife of Adar Poonawalla and Chair of Serum Life Sciences, had previously disclosed plans for a new Poonawalla Vaccines Research Building supported by a GBP 50 million funding commitment.
“Vaccines save lives, and the Poonawalla family has dedicated their lifelong attention to the development of vaccines,” she stated at the time. Our dedication lies in creating and providing vaccines to those who require them the most.
“In order to achieve this, we establish numerous scientific partnerships with the top research institutions globally, but today, we are presenting this major gift to provide the elite team at Oxford with a state-of-the-art facility from which to advance their research.” It came after SII’s earlier Oxford University partnership, which resulted in the swift development and widespread distribution of the Oxford-AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine at scale, produced and delivered in India under the brand name Covishield.
