A Malibu home appears to match one in a parcel of three homes King Abdullah II purchased through shell companies.
The King of Jordan secretly spent $70 million on neighboring Malibu properties through separate shell companies, according to one of the biggest leaks of financial documents.
Abdullah II bin Al-Hussein spent more than $106 million on at least 15 homes across the United States and United Kingdom, according to a trove of files dubbed the Pandora Papers obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.
In 2014, a company called Nabisco Holdings SA bought a seven-bedroom home in the Point Dume peninsula of Malibu for $33.5 million, a record for the area. The company was based in the British Virgin Islands and secretly owned by Al-Hussein, the Washington Post reports. The property, which was first built in 1999 and owned by a television producer, can’t be seen from the road.
Two of the home’s neighboring properties are also owned by two other companies the documents tie to Al-Hussein. The Washington Post reports he purchased one in 2015 for $12.2 million and the other in 2017 for $23 million, bringing his Malibu spending close to $70 million.
Al-Hussein first entered US real estate in 2012 with the $6.5 million purchase of a flat in Washington D.C.’s Georgetown neighborhood. The Post reports companies linked to the king spent just over $3 million on neighboring condo units over the next two years, just before Crown Prince Hussein, the king’s son, enrolled at nearby Georgetown University.
The report notes that in 2011 — as Arab Spring uprisings took on leaders in nearby regions — Al-Hussein dropped millions through separate shell companies on properties in the United Kingdom across in London’s swankiest neighborhoods and southeast England.
The Pandora Papers involved the investigation of more than 12 million documents and files showcasing the wealth of the world’s richest and most powerful people.
[BBC] — Holden Walter-Warner
