Villa Mobutu sold in Savigny VD

“UBS has sold the property to a public limited company at a satisfactory price,” bank spokesman Jean-Raphaël Fontannaz said in a report in the daily “24 heures” on Saturday. He did not want to tell the Keystone-SDA news agency the amount of the sale that had been made some time ago.

The UBS spokesperson also did not want to reveal the name of the new owner of the Mobutu villa. According to “24 heures” it is about the Genevan businessman Ronald Zacharias. In the newspaper report, he explains that the purchase price is closer to the amount UBS paid four years ago than the canton’s estimate of 18 million francs.

The villa and outbuildings offer around 700 square meters of living space and a park of around 60,000 square meters. The property belonged to the President of Zaire, Mobutu Sese Seko. He died of cancer in Morocco in September 1997. He had led the country, renamed the Democratic Republic of the Congo, with an iron fist for 30 years.

A few months after Mobutu’s death, the villa was confiscated and the ruler’s interior and cars were sold. Switzerland also blocked the ruler’s assets for around eight million francs. Because a refund to the Democratic Republic of the Congo failed, the money was eventually paid to the heirs.

Four years after Mobutu’s death, a couple bought the villa in 2001 for 3.1 million Swiss francs. After a separation, only the woman lived in the house, which she had to move out of in 2016 after it was acquired by UBS. (SDA)