VIP-trend of the past week (18–24.05.2009)

The last week has brought a handful of news dedicated to property units belonging to well-known actors, athletes, businessmen and politicians.

Indian city of Mumbai is demolishing local slums, including homes that belong to actors of the Oscar-winning movie “Slumdog Millionaire”. The week before last a bulldozer has razed a shanty, in which the family of Azharuddin Mohammed Ismail, one of the leading actors in this movie, lived. Last week construction machinery has reached the «residence» of a nine-year-old actress Rubina Ali.

Auction house Christie's has announced the commencement of bidding for the house belonging to a famous Swedish movie-director, Ingmar Bergman. The unit is located on the Fårö island in Gotland province, it has three bedrooms, and a living room with a fireplace. The house has already aroused the interest of buyers who offer three to four million euros for it.

A famous American country singer LeAnn Rimes has recently put her brand-new three-storey mansion in Tennessee on sale. The house, in which LeAnn and her husband have moved in September last year, has four bedrooms, six bathrooms, a living room, two kitchens, fitness room and guest rooms. The total floor area of the building exceeds 1.2 thousand sq. m., the asking price is $ 7.45 million. The reasons why the singer has decided to sell the mansion just six months after the purchase are not disclosed.

The former world bodybuilding champion, actor and current California governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, may lose his childhood home located in the Austrian city of Thal-Graz. Previously Schwarzenegger has announced his intention to repurchase the “ancestral nest”, but it turned out to be that he was not walking-the-talk. The current owner of the house couldn’t wait any longer, so he has put the 201-square-meter-large unit on sale for € 450 thousand.

The legendary Argentinean football player Diego Maradona has announced his willingness to open a sports cafe in Dubai. He plans to exhibit memorabilia belonging to such football stars like Maradona himself, Pele, Ziko and Dunga there. Construction of the cafe will be handled by a tycoon Sulaiman al Fahim, the owner of English Premier League football club “Manchester City”.

A famous British football player, Phil Neville, has sold his 18th-century mansion for ₤2.6 million. The asking price of a unit was actually ₤4 million, but nobody wanted to pay such a great sum for a 1.7-thousand-square-meter-large home, with 27 bedrooms, four-room home for maids, tennis courts and a garage for three cars. Supposedly, due to this factor, the captain of “Everton” football club has decided to make a significant discount.

On hearsay, in 2008 a Russian billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov was going to buy a French Villa Leopolda for 500 million euro. This would have made it the most expensive villa in the world. But the deal fell through and perhaps it’s not for nothing. According to the Chairman and CEO of Sotheby's International Realty, Alexander V.G. Kraft, the current value of this object works out not more than 30-40 million euros.

Latvian state joint stock company Valsts nekustamie īpašumi (VNĪ) is beginning to search for a spacious apartment for president Valdis Zatlers. The flat will be granted to him at the end of presidential powers. The apartment must comply with certain requirements. First, its floor area must be no less than 200 sq. m. Second, it should be located in the historic center of Riga. Finally, it can only be offered by a direct owner.

American politician, Vice-president Joseph Biden may turn out to be an unwitting owner of Bosnian land plot. The point is that in his speech in front of the Bosnia and Herzegovina Parliament, Biden has quoted the poem of a Bosnian who had immigrated to the United States. A resident of Bosnian village Bakici, Hazim Imamovic, has watched a TV-broadcast of the speech and was so touched by it that he has offered a part of his land to the vice president of the United States as a sign of gratitude.