Moscow Mayor’s wife pays £50m for house

The richest women in Russia, Elena Baturina (pictured), has spent £50m on a London property – a house called Wittanhurst in Highgate, which in size is second only to Buckingham Palace and was recently used as the setting for the BBC talent show, Fame Academy. Baturina, whose husband Yuri Luzhkov has been the mayor of Moscow since 1992, is worth something in the region of £1.3bn in her own right, and she is said to have paid for the house in cash.

Witanhurst, a 90-room Grade II Queen Anne listed mansion, is in a dilapidated state, with holes in the ceilings and crumbling cornices. No work has been done on it since it was bought from an Arab family by property developer Marcus Cooper last July for £32m. But with her company, Inteco, a building conglomerate of the post-Soviet era, 45-year-old Baturina should have no problem restoring the place to its former glory. When completed, it is thought that she will use the property to display her art collection.

Something of a controversial figure in Russia, Baturina is said to have her pick of many of the more lucrative construction contracts in Moscow (her hubby is mayor, remember). And she is not the sort of person to let problems get her down. When, for example, she failed to find a suitable school for her two daughters, she simply built her own, complete with state-of-the-art security.