Iran’s newly appointed supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, reportedly owns two luxury apartments in west London overlooking the Israeli embassy, according to British media citing a Bloomberg investigation into his alleged international property holdings.
The apartments, purchased in 2014 and 2016 through intermediaries but only recently linked to him, are located on the sixth and seventh floors of a building on Palace Green in Kensington, the same street as the embassy, Evening Standard and Daily Mail reported on Sunday.
The Times of London also reported, on March 5, that the apartment building in question “sits next to the Israeli embassy on Palace Green.”
The reports emerged after four Iranian and British-Iranian men were arrested in London early on Friday under suspicion of surveilling “locations and individuals” linked to London’s Jewish community.
The Daily Mail quoted a terrorism and security specialist saying that the location of the apartments means “Iran owns the view into the back of the Israeli Embassy from less than 50 metres away.”
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The cited expert, Roger Macmillan, who it said was a counter-terrorism specialist and former director of security at the Iranian opposition channel Iran International, added: “Two apartments, direct line of sight, held through Mojtaba Khamenei. That’s not a property portfolio – it’s a permanent surveillance platform. This is a serious security breach.”
Macmillan said the apartments could be used to monitor and photograph embassy staff and visitors, enable audio capture of outdoor conversations of embassy personnel, as well as facilitate “laser-assisted monitoring of window vibrations to extract speech from the inside.”
The close range would also allow hacking of embassy wireless networks to monitor internet traffic, the Mail also cited Macmillan as warning.
The two apartments are also close to Kensington Palace, the official residence of William and Kate, the prince and princess of Wales, the newspapers said.
The information on the Kensington apartments was derived from a January investigation by Bloomerg that detailed Mojtaba Khamenei’s property holdings, some of them acquired via a middleman named Ali Ansari and “layers of shell companies,” including a firm called Birch Ventures that is based in the Isle of Man. The Bloomberg article did not mention the Kensington apartments.
The Evening Standard and Daily Mail apparently cross-referenced the material published by Bloomberg with the UK Land Registry as the basis for their reports on the two Kensington apartments, which the Mail said were believed to be worth some $40 million.
The Bloomberg article said Mojtaba’s global property portfolio, worth hundreds of millions of dollars, includes over a dozen properties in London, including on north London’s Bishops Avenue, also known as “Billionaires’ Row.”
While Mojtaba “refrains from putting assets in his own name, he has been directly involved in the [property] deals, some of which stretch back at least as far as 2011,” Bloomberg reported. “His financial power has embraced everything from Persian Gulf shipping to Swiss bank accounts and British luxury property worth in excess of £100 million ($138 million),” Bloomberg said, citing sources familiar with the matter and the assessment of a leading Western intelligence agency. “Together, the web of firms has helped Khamenei to channel funds — by some estimates in the billions of dollars — into Western markets, despite US sanctions imposed on him in 2019.”
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Bloomberg said the holdings also include a villa in the “Beverly Hills of Dubai,” and “upscale European hotels from Frankfurt to Mallorca.” Funds for the purchases have been routed through bank accounts in the UK, Switzerland, Liechtenstein and the United Arab Emirates, Bloomberg said, adding that its sources said the money came mainly from Iranian oil sales.
Iran’s ruling clerics appointed Mojtaba Khamenei as supreme leader on Sunday, eight days after the US and Israel launched a bombing campaign on the Islamic Republic in which an Israeli air strike killed his father and predecessor, ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Mojtaba Khamenei’s mother, wife, and son were reportedly also killed, and Israeli officials believe Mojtaba himself was wounded after being targeted in a strike last week.
Bloomberg reported that none of the documents relating to the property portfolio name Khamenei as the direct owner; instead, purchases appear under the name of Ansari, a 57-year-old Iranian businessman and construction magnate, whom the investigation described as a “financial conduit” for the new supreme leader and a family friend.
The UK sanctioned Ansari in October over alleged ties to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), which has played a central role in brutally quashing Iranian protests in recent weeks. The IRGC is an American and EU-designated terrorist organization with which Mojtaba Khamenei is closely linked.
In announcing the sanctions, British authorities called Ansari a “corrupt Iranian banker and businessman” who had “facilitated and provided support to hostile activity.” Bloomberg reported that Ansari obtained a Cypriot passport in 2016, enabling him to open bank accounts and set up companies across Europe.
Ansari, in a statement to Bloomberg through his lawyer, said that he “strongly denies that he has ever had any financial or personal relationship with Mojtaba Khamenei” or the IRGC. He also said he intended to challenge the sanctions imposed against him.
Mojtaba Khamenei was sanctioned by the US in 2019, during President Donald Trump’s first term, over his work to “advance his father’s destabilizing regional ambitions and oppressive domestic objectives.”
Crime & Courts Correspondent
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