A company linked to the president of the United Arab Emirates has picked up a luxury mansion in one of London‘s poshest areas for what he would likely consider pocket change – at an eye-watering £65million.

Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed al Nahyan acquired the house in Chelsea – complete with swimming pool, cinema room and car lift – in November last year via a shell company incorporated in the British Virgin Islands and based in Jersey.

The house was one of three built by a group of businessmen on the site of a former BT telephone exchange in the 2000s. MBZ, as he is often known, succeeded his late brother as UAE president and ruler of Abu Dhabi in 2022.

Each of the identical mansions was built with a swimming pool, cinema room and car lift – ideal for the sheikh to live in comfort should he find himself in the UK capital.

But planning records suggest the sheikh already has designs on overhauling the house – after a building warrant to remove it and create a gym was approved by the local borough council last year.

The application was received on November 14, two weeks after the house had been acquired.

MBZ could well make use of the house on his visits to London – having visited the UK in an official capacity several times in recent years.

As Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi he visited London in 2021, where he inspected the Grenadier Guards alongside then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson, whom he also met in 2020 for a socially distanced visit during the pandemic.

The sensational sale was first reported by Bloomberg and since confirmed by MailOnline using Land Registry records.

The transaction was completed through a firm linked to the al Nahyan family incorporated in the British Virgin Islands, with a Jersey correspondence address.

It was one of just a handful of property transactions in London for near-unthinkable sums last year – suggesting a bounceback in the market after property prices slumped due to higher interest rates and taxes.

The number of pricey homes exchanging hands for big money is at its highest level in years – with £3.4billion changing hands for the most valuable homes.

According to the Knight Frank Super-Prime Intelligence report, 175 houses sold above the £10million mark in the 12 months to November 2023.

And of those, 28 transactions were for homes worth £30million or more – on a par with sales in 2013/14, the last peak in London’s super-prime housing market.

In 2015, one of the other mansions sold for £51million and was described as having nine, bedrooms, nine bathrooms, a cinema, a Japanese water garden and an indoor swimming pool.

Chelsea was the most popular area for property purchases worth over £5million last year – making up 12 per cent of these transactions, according to broker Savills Plc.

And in another mega property deal last year, Indian billionaire Adar Poonawalla, also known as the ‘vaccine prince’, bought a Mayfair mansion for £138million – the most expensive property deal of 2023.

Poonawalla reached a deal with Dominika Kulczyk, daughter of Poland’s richest man Jan Kulczyk, to buy Aberconway House – a 25,000 square foot home from the 1920s near Hyde Park.

The price tag made the property the second-most expensive home ever sold in London and the biggest deal of the year, according to luxury property agents.

The property was acquired by Serum Life Sciences, a UK subsidiary of the Poonawalla family’s Serum Institute of India, people familiar with the transaction said.

The next largest sale of 2023, according to agents, was the £113million purchase of Hanover Lodge. Essar Group billionaire Ravi Ruia’s family office bought the mansion in Regent’s Park, which had been linked to Russian property investor Andrey Goncharenko.

MBZ, 63, is the third son of Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, and became crown prince of Abu Dhabi in 2004 before becoming the president of the UAE in 2022.

Under his rule, the United Arab Emirates has become a more socially liberal, pro-business country – but the former UAE Air Force pilot has also rapidly expanded the country’s military spending.

He is also perceived as ruling the Emirates with an iron fist – as there are no free elections, and the country lacks a free and independent media.

It sits at 145 out of 180 countries on Reporters Sans Frontieres’ media freedom index, which says the government ‘prevents both local and foreign independent media outlets from thriving by tracking down and persecuting dissenting voices’.

The Al Nahyans are one of the richest families in the world, with a net worth estimated to be somewhere in excess of $300billion.

An Abu Dhabi-backed fund, majority-owned by MBZ’s brother and vice-president of the UAE Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan, is currently involved in a deal to take over the Telegraph Media Group, publishers of the Daily Telegraph.