No buyers for Mobutu’s former Swiss villa

An auction of the luxury Swiss villa of former Zairean dictator Mobutu Sese Seko was called off on Thursday because no one wanted to buy it, even at just over half its market value, AFP reported. The six-hectare estate with a distant view of Lake Geneva was expected to sell for more than US $2.56 million, but the auctioneer suspended the sale when no one offered the starting price of US $1.5 million. Local authorities in the nearby town of Lavaux said they would decide next week on whether to try another auction with a lower reserve price, or to put the “Domaine de Miguettes” up for sale through a sealed bidding process.

The 30-room mansion and its land in a village near Lausanne were meant to be sold off to repay creditors and unpaid local taxes. The villa was seized along with all Mobutu’s other assets in Switzerland in 1997, including US $3.6 million in bank accounts, after the ex-dictator’s death. Former political opponents and successive DRC governments have claimed that Mobutu hoarded hundreds of millions of dollars abroad. Last month, demonstrators briefly occupied the property and called for 10 percent of the sale proceeds to be used for social initiatives in the DRC (formerly Zaire), which has been torn apart by civil war over the past three years.