The Times of London reports on another Russian invasion, this one of the Riviera instead of the Republic of Georgia. This house purchase for $750 million cost roughly 7x the previous record set a few years ago:

A mysterious Russian billionaire has trumped his big-spending rivals and broken a world record by splashing out €500 million (£392 million) on one of the most sumptuous villas on the French Riviera. The price of the Villa Leopolda, a Belle Époque mansion on the heights of Villefrance, has amazed estate agents but fuelled local worries that the invasion of Russian money on the Côte d’Azur is getting out of hand.

Since the early 1990s, Russian oligarchs, drawn by memories of the Riviera-mad old Russian aristocracy, have been piling into seaside properties at Cap Ferrat, Cap d’Antibes, Saint-Tropez and the other great playgrounds.

None, however, has come near the price with which the unnamed Russian clinched the Leopolda deal with Lily Safra, the widow of Edmond Safra, a Lebanese banker who was killed by an arsonist’s fire in Switzerland in 2003…The previous record for a house was said to be the £57 million that Lakshmi Mittal, the steel tycoon, paid for a property in Kensington Palace Gardens in 2004.

No doubt there are serious and diverse geopolitical reasons behind Russia’s invasion of Georgia, but this kind of outrageous market top in real estate prices paid by Russian kleptocrats and Putin allies suggests that money and oil alone could potentially be a sufficient explanation for Russia’s recent outrageous actions.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 19th, 2008 at 10:14 pm and is filed under General, War, business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.