A French business tycoon was forced to avoid the recovery of a $54 million mansion after technicians discovered a 30-year-old frame buried under rubble and planks, triggering a homicide investigation.
Investment banker Jean-Bernard Lafonta bought the space in a bidding war in January that lasted only 15 minutes, the Daily Mail reported, paying six times the reserve value of the block near the French prime minister’s personal residence.
In late February, staff had to guard the 17,000-square-foot ruined Paris building. The house, located in the prosperous Faubourg Saint-Germain district of Paris, had been home to the French aristocracy for centuries before it was emptied in the 1980s.
“Everyone was surprised to learn that he had been there for so long, without any of us knowing,” Sabine Lebreton, director of a local organization committed to the preservation of the mansion, told Le Parisien.
“In February, just before closing, the paintings were going well. Debris trucks left the site every day,” Lebreton said. Then, all of a sudden, everything stopped.
“He’s a homeless consumer with an alcohol problem,” a police source told Le Monde, and is believed to possibly have been killed in a row with some other consumer who was in a similar situation.
“We can also believe in a fight with someone who lives on the margins … But we don’t know if he died in the mansion or was taken there, and we’ll probably never know who was responsible. It is quite conceivable that the killer himself is now dead, ” said the police.
The restoration of the mansion, a stone’s throw from the official residence of the French prime minister, will resume after the summer. It is being renovated in area for foreign company.
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