Chigirinsky: Nazarbayev’s Inner Circle Tried to Buy $500M Villa in France

Former Gazpromneft co-owner Shalva Chigirinsky has revealed that associates of Nursultan Nazarbayev attempted to purchase him a luxury villa on the French Riviera, Orda.kz reports.

In an interview with Yury Dud, Chigirinsky said the estate covered 3.2 hectares, with a main house containing 15 bedrooms and a guest house with six more. The property also included two swimming pools, a helipad, and a bomb shelter, later converted into a wine cellar.

I was offered much more for it than Gazprom ultimately paid. The valuation reached half a billion dollars. Nazarbayev’s people wanted to buy it for him as a summer residence. They wanted a helipad, two swimming pools, and plenty of bedrooms. Villas like that simply don’t exist,he said.

Chigirinsky had purchased the villa in 2001 for $14.5 million from the family of former Zaire dictator Mobutu Sese Seko, investing another $25 million in renovations.

He sold it to Gazpromneft in 2009 for about $70 million. French media later reported that gymnast Alina Kabaeva lived in the house. The villa is currently rented out but has since been seized in France as part of a money-laundering investigation.

This is not the only case of high-value foreign property linked to the Nazarbayev family. In Germany, Dinara and Timur Kulibayev were found to own palaces and a castle-hotel worth more than €100 million.

Original Author: Ruslan Loginov