The Kulibayev family has had another problem with foreign real estate. The court of the Swiss canton of Vaud annulled the reconstruction permit, in fact, actually prohibited the demolition and new construction of the Fleur du Lac (“Flower of the Lake”) hotel in the suburbs of Lausanne. This asset is owned by the local company of the same name, Fleur du Lac SA, owned by the family Timur Kulibayev And Dinara Nazarbayeva, the middle daughter of the first president of Kazakhstan. This is the first time this family asset has been mentioned publicly.
The Kulibayevs’ hotel in the town of Morzh has only 30 rooms. It was built in 1955. In addition to accommodation, guests could use the restaurant, bar and conference room. Frankly speaking, it’s not the widest choice. The last partial reconstruction there was carried out in 2016. We do not have exact information about when the hotel came under the control of the family and how much they had to pay for it. This approximately happened in the second half of the last decade, just before the last reconstruction. At the same time, the cost of such objects in the district at that time was about $5-10 million. But the Kulibayevs did not plan to leave the object in the form in which they got it.
Back in 2019, they began the process of completely renovating the hotel, which involved demolishing the building and building a more modern hotel in its place. The number of rooms was planned to be at least doubled. The Kulibayevs wanted to add a spa center, an indoor swimming pool and underground parking for 120-130 cars to the interior of the future hotel. Investments in the project were estimated at $20-30 million.
But local residents and authorities decided that the new hotel would create too much noise in the area. In addition, the reconstruction implied the destruction of two dozen trees in the adjacent territory – this was something the local community could not allow. For this reason, the hotel has been virtually closed since 2020, and Fleur du Lac SA lawyers have all this time been trying to defend the Kulibayevs’ right to another access to Lake Geneva. They have already “cut through” the first one at Bellerive Castle, the reconstruction of which also had problems.
This is not the first time that the Kulibayevs and local residents have disagreements in their ideas about the renovation of facilities in Europe. Obviously, for much the same reason, they are virtually abandoned. castles of the Kulibayev-Nazarbayevs in Germany worth 100 million euros. And last fall, the High Court of Catalonia put an end to the proceedings between the family of Nursultan Nazarbayev, who owns Can Juncadella estate and the municipal authorities of Lloret de Mar. Timur Kulibayev, who through a chain of his companies owns this gigantic estate on the Mediterranean coast, has been suing the municipal authorities since 2009. The reason was a public road that a Kazakh billionaire arbitrarily blocked for local residents. The authorities and townspeople also had questions about the work that was carried out on the territory of the estate, but, apparently, Kulibayev’s lawyers managed to repel them – the estate is working and, according to local media reports, he sometimes rests there himself Nursultan Nazarbaev.
One of the most high-profile “renovations” of Kulibayev, which resulted in a real political scandal, was the reconstruction Sunninghill Park mansion 40 km from London. Former owner of the estate – Prince Andrew, son of the late Queen Elizabeth II. For the mansion, Kulibayev paid him £3 million more than the requested amount (in total, the house and land cost him £15 million). This gave rise to the British press and political opponents to suggest that the amount paid in excess of the property’s valuation was a bribe to the prince from members of the family of the former president of Kazakhstan. The residence of Prince Kulibayev was eventually demolished and construction of a new mansion began in its place. Construction work was completed in 2021, 6 years after it began.