Records show that Marwan Kheireddine ceased control over luxury property holdings in Britain just months after French authorities interrogated him on charges of corruption and criminal conspiracy  as a part of the former Central Bank Governor Riad Salameh corruption probe.

Marwan Kheireddine, the Chairman of Bank Al Mawarid, is known to have an overseas fortune worth millions. 

Daraj Media previously reported that the notorious banker and former minister and his family, most notably his brother Wassim, own a number of offshore companies and high value assets outside Lebanon. These include a yacht and a penthouse apartment in New York that Marwan had purchased from Hollywood actor Jennifer Lawrence.

Daraj also identified previously unknown property holdings linked to the Kheireddine family in the United Kingdom. Recent documents reveal that Marwan transferred his shares of the jointly owned offshore companies that owned the assets to his brother, just after French authorities questioned him in France on suspicion of money laundering in 2023.

Marwan in Mayfair

Wedged between five-star hotels on Park Lane, famously the second most expensive property on a British Monopoly board, is Aldford House. 

Described by Francis H W Sheppard, a historian of London, as “brisker and less cautious in detail than most other blocks of flats in Park Lane [with] brick and bands of stonework of French oolite,” the luxury block of apartments looks out onto Hyde Park. However, what you can’t tell from the building’s polished exterior is that most of it was owned by Lebanese banker and former minister Marwan Kheireddine—or at least, it was, up until mid-2023.

British land registry records show that a Panamanian company called K Group Holding Inc. bought the lease for Aldford House for £86 million in 2012 (around US$158 million today). At the time of the purchase, K Group Holdings Inc.’s beneficial owners were Marwan and Wassim Kheireddine.

The 2012 purchase of Aldford House modified the building’s previous lease—which dated back to January 1987 —and was linked to Salim Kheireddine, Marwan and Wassim Kheireddine’s father, and a company called Aldford Investments S.A.

Aldford Investments S.A. was founded in 1987 in Panama with Farid al-Khalil as its president. Farid Khalil is Salim Kheireddine’s brother-in-law, his sister Huda having married the elder Kheireddine. According to OpenCorporates, the company’s status is now “suspended.”

A Panamanian company bought Flat 55 in Aldford House in 1998. British commercial registry documents reveal the beneficial owner of the company, creatively called Fifty Five Aldford Inc., is a member of Lebanon’s parliament and former minister Anwar Khalil, another of Salim’s brothers-in-law.

Under the new 2012 lease, occupants of 16 of the 42 flats in the building retained ownership over their apartments under subleases while K Group Holdings Inc. owned the other 18 flats in the Aldford House. These included all the units on the sixth and seventh floors and a penthouse overlooking Hyde Park on the eighth.

Between 2013 and 2018, K Group Holdings Inc. sold various flats to other Panamanian companies of which the Kheireddine brothers were joint beneficiaries. British land registry records state only a few of the prices for which they were sold, but among the exceptions are the sales of Flats 61, 62, and 71 in 2013 for £23 million, £28 million, and £22 million respectively.

This left Marwan and Wassim Kheireddine controlling ten apartments in one of London’s most affluent postcodes through nine different offshore companies at the start of 2023.

Trouble in Paris

In April 2023, the French judiciary notified Marwan Kheireddine of informal charges against him for suspected participation in a criminal investigation and aggravated money laundering. French authorities confiscated the Chairman of Al Mawarid Bank’s passport and told him not to leave the country temporarily. Following the investigation, Kheireddine returned to Beirut on April 23, 2023. 

Just two months earlier, European prosecutors visited Beirut and questioned Kheireddine about large sums of money in accounts belonging to Riad Salameh in his bank. 

Salameh, Lebanon’s former Central Bank Governor, stood accused by France and other European countries of embezzling hundreds of millions of dollars worth of public funds during his 30-year tenure. Over this period, the money in his accounts at Al Mawarid Bank ballooned from US$15 million in 1993 to over US$150 million in 2019, according to Reuters.

“We had him on our list of people of interest: [the evidence] really pointed to Marwan Kheireddine as having a central role in the conspiracy,” said Chanez Mensous, Advocacy and Litigation Manager at Sherpa, the French NGO that brought the case against Salameh and Kheireddine in France.

French authorities placed Kheireddine under investigation for criminal conspiracy and complicity in money laundering on behalf of Riad Salameh, despite being “key in drafting and securing government approval of the Cross-Border Cash Limitation Law, the Capital Markets Law, and updating the Anti-Money Laundering Law.”

Leaving Mayfair

While being questioned by the French judiciary in April 2023, Kheireddine stated that in 2018 that he and his brother divided their management of the family business interests when asked about his foreign bank accounts, according to documents seen by Daraj. 

“[Wassim] took London, and I took Lebanon,” he told investigators at the time.

Whether or not he was referring solely to the active management of the brothers’ shared business interests is uncertain. However, commercial registry documents confirm that in April 2023, Marwan still part-owned all the Panama-based companies through which the brothers controlled their vast real estate portfolio in London.

This changed on July 1, 2023 when Marwan Kheireddine was removed as the beneficiary of at least 15 offshore companies, leaving Wassim as the only remaining beneficial owner. 

These included the nine companies connected to Aldford House but also four more offshore companies. 

Two of these companies bought a penthouse each atop the Centurion Building in Nine Elms, London. The flats, which overlook the Thames, cost a total of £3.1 million in 2007 (roughly equivalent to US$5.75 million today).

The third and fourth offshore companies had been used by the Kheireddine brothers to buy up millions of pounds worth of property in Buckinghamshire, South East England.

Danesfield House, a Neo-Tudor country estate, was originally built by a soap magnate at the turn of the 20th century. After having served as a Royal Air Force base that processed aerial reconnaissance photos during World War 2 and then as the headquarters of a milk processing company, it was finally turned into a luxury hotel in 1991. 

For its storied history and 65 acres of gardens, an offshore company owned by Marwan and Wassim Kheireddine called Danesfield Properties Inc. paid £22 million in 2004 ($50 million in 2025 U.S. dollars.).

In 2015, the brothers bought a large country house located near the hotel for another £1.23 million.  

Marwan Kheireddine severed the direct connection between himself and UK assets likely worth more than $200 million all in a single day. 

“A big focus of [the French investigation] is identifying as much wealth as possible to give back to the Lebanese people,” Mensous told Daraj. “France has a law that provides for the restitution of stolen assets to other countries.”

When asked about the timing of the transfer of his shares in Panamanian companies to his brother, Marwan Kheireddine told Daraj in a written statement that the transfer was part of “the family’s estate management that started in 2012 and was completed in 2023 and has nothing to do with the French procedure.” However, he did not provide evidence to support this claim.

Regarding the French investigation, he stressed that “[it] is against Riad Salame and a group of his close associates and family members and is not directed toward me. Furthermore, my relationship with Salame was thoroughly examined in 2023 by the French judge which determined that I could leave France. I have neither been indicted nor charged. Also, note that none of my assets were frozen anywhere in the world at any point.”

He denied that he was hiding assets using Panamanian companies, stating that the Central American country has preferable rates for the type of “legal vehicles that own an asset” that the Kheireddine family use to hold their vast real estate portfolio and that “each of those companies has to be registered with the Companies House in the UK and the ultimate beneficial owner has to be declared.”

While it is true that the beneficial owners of offshore companies which buy or sell land in the UK must be registered with Companies House, this has only been the case since 2022 when the British government enacted the Economic Crime (Transparency and Enforcement) Act. This established the Register of Overseas Entities to “[drive] dirty money out of the UK.”