LOUVECIENNES, France -- When Chateau Louis XIV sold for more than $300 million two years ago, Fortune magazine called it "the world's most expensive home," and Town & Country swooned over its gold-leafed fountain, marble statues and hedged labyrinth set in a 57-acre landscaped park.
But for all the lavish details, one fact was missing: the identity of the buyer.
Now, it turns out that the paper trail leads to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, heir to the Saudi throne and the driving force behind a series of bold policies transforming Saudi Arabia and shaking up the Middle East.
The 2015 purchase appears to be one of several extravagant acquisitions -- including a $500 million yacht and a $450 million Leonardo da Vinci painting -- by a prince who is leading a sweeping crackdown on corruption and self-enrichment by the Saudi elite and preaching fiscal austerity at home.
The story of Chateau Louis XIV, as pieced together through interviews and documents by The New York Times, unfolds like a financial whodunit, featuring a lawyer in the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg and a fixer for the very rich from the Mediterranean nation of Malta. Even reality star Kim Kardashian made a cameo, reportedly considering the chateau for her wedding to Kanye West.
The ownership of the chateau, in Louveciennes, France, near Versailles, is carefully shrouded by shell companies in France and Luxembourg. Those companies are owned by Eight Investment Co., a Saudi firm managed by the head of Salman's personal foundation. Advisers to members of the royal family say the chateau ultimately belongs to the crown prince.
Eight Investment was the same company that backed Salman's purchase of the 440-foot yacht from a Russian vodka tycoon in 2015. The company also recently bought a 620-acre estate in Conde-sur-Vesgre, known as Le Rouvray, an hour's drive from Paris. The chateau's architect is refurbishing the manor house there and building structures for an apparent hunting compound, according to permit records at the local town hall.
In less than three years in the public eye, Salman, 32, has forged a reputation as an assertive leader. He opened an air campaign in Yemen and spearheaded the blockade of Qatar. Yet he also appears to have won the popular support of many young Saudis for reining in the country's religious police, promising to give women the right to drive and announcing that movie theaters will be allowed to open again.
But his swift rise has ruffled some of his elders, especially when he shoved aside his older cousin to become crown prince. He has come under even more scrutiny since the arrests last month of nearly a dozen of his royal cousins and hundreds of other businessmen or officials, who have been detained at the Ritz-Carlton in Riyadh, now the world's most luxurious jail. The government characterized the arrests as a crackdown on corruption, but critics have called it a political purge and a shakedown.
Salman, in an interview with The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, said he expected the state to recoup some $100 billion in settlements from the detained elite. But he dismissed as "ludicrous" accusations that the arrests were politically motivated, saying that was the only way to root out corruption and self-dealing.
"So you have to send a signal, and the signal going forward now is, 'You will not escape,'" the prince said.
Neither he nor the Saudi government responded to requests for comment for this article.
Even before the crackdown, unbridled spending by the king's family, whose income sources remain opaque, had raised eyebrows. With the price of oil, the main source of the country's wealth, having plummeted from record highs in the past decade, the government has tried to close yawning budget deficits with financial discipline.
But last year, even as the government canceled a quarter of a trillion dollars' worth of projects to rein in deficits, King Salman was building a luxurious new vacation palace on the Moroccan coast.
Last month, da Vinci's painting Salvator Mundi sold for $450.3 million to an anonymous buyer, the highest price for any work of art sold at auction. The buyer, the Times found, turned out to be an obscure Saudi prince with close ties to the crown prince. People familiar with the sale and U.S. intelligence officials said he was acting on behalf of the crown prince.
The Saudi government later disputed that report, saying variously that the Saudi buyer acted as an agent for Abu Dhabi, in the United Arab Emirates, where the painting will hang at the new branch of the Louvre, or that the crown prince had purchased the painting to give to Abu Dhabi. People familiar with the details insist the crown prince was the real buyer at the time of the sale.
The two new French properties, Chateau Louis XIV and Le Rouvray, are owned by two French companies. Those companies are owned by a Luxembourg company, Prestigestate SARL, which is in turn owned by Eight Investment. Thamer Nassief, who lists his occupation on LinkedIn as "President of Crown Prince Private Affairs," is a manager of both Prestigestate and Eight Investment.
Eight Investment, according to documents from the Bermudan law firm Appleby, is "owned by members of the Saudi Royal Family," and its "wealth is derived from the king and the state."
A Section on 12/17/2017