Hello and welcome. You are listening to Patrick Boyle on Finance, a podcast exploring ideas from quantitative finance, examining events occurring in markets right now and financial history to see what lessons can be taken away, including interviews with some of the most interesting people in the world of finance. To learn more about the podcast, visit onfinance.org.

One Hyde Park is a luxury apartment building in Knightsbridge, London. It was developed by the

Candy Brothers, designed by Richard Rogers and completed in 2009.

The luxury apartments come with panic rooms, bulletproof glass and bowler-hatted security

guards that were trained by the British Special Forces.

One of the apartments in the building was recently listed for sale at $242 million.

The building itself is best appreciated at night, as it's black dark with not a light on in the building.

It would appear that no one is home. It's not that the apartments haven't been sold. They've all been

sold. It's just that not many of them

are lived in. Out of the 86 apartments in the building, only 12 are registered in actual

people's names. The rest are held in names of corporations registered in places like

Cyprus, Thailand, the Cayman Islands, the British Virgin Islands,

Lichtenstein and the Isle of Man.

The owners are wealthy and most of them don't want you to know who they are or how they got

their money.

Ukraine's richest man is reported to have bought two apartments in the building and merge them into

one very large apartment. Another is owned by Kazakhstan's richest man, a politician who

made his money in the country's notoriously corrupt natural resources sector.

Apartments are allegedly owned by Russian oligarchs, Malaysian, Nigerian,

Qatari and Taiwanese billionaires, but their names are not on the titles.

One of the Nigerian First Lady's favourite dress designers who was awarded 600,000 barrels of oil per month from the Nigerian

oil company for being a good friend allegedly owns five apartments in the building through

...