Dubai ruler wants third mansion on Highlands estate due to ‘lack of accommodation’
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The billionaire ruler of Dubai has submitted plans for a third mansion on his Highlands estate due to a “lack of accommodation”.
Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum plans to build an 11-bedroom lodge on his 63,000-acre Inverinate Estate in Wester Ross only weeks after an extension had been signed off by local planners.
The sheikh, who had a friendship with the late Queen and gifted her a number of racehorses, has an estate which already has a 16-bed hunting lodge, while permission for extension to one of two large homes on the site was signed off last month.
Agents for his UK company Smech Management said that his time at the estate had been “limited by lack of accommodation”.
The new mansion, if approved, would be built next to the 17-bedroom Benula Lodge, finished in 2021 at a reported cost of £2.4 million according to documents lodged with Highland Council.
A design statement submitted alongside the application states that the estate’s owners “typically travel in large groups of immediate and extended family and friends”.
It adds: “In recent years their travel to Inverinate has been limited by lack of accommodation.
“Additional staff accommodation was completed in 2017 to create infrastructure that would support greater use of the estate by the owner.
“This new application seeks to create residential accommodation for the use of the owners, their family and their guests in order they may enjoy more frequent and extended visits to Inverinate.”
Designs for the house show it will include a 57 square metre living room and ground floor bedroom, as well as five bedrooms on the first floor and five on the second.
If the plans are approved they will be the latest in many updates to the Sheikh’s estate, which he visits for a few weeks every year.
He is believed to have thirty children but the additions to accommodation for them have angered locals in the past. One initially rejected extension to his Ptarmigan Lodge on the estate was eventually green-lit on the basis that his company paid £30,000 towards affordable housing in the area.
The sheikh has been previously engulfed in controversy. His daughter, Princess Latifa, met with the United Nations Human Rights Commissioner in Paris last year where she said she was living how she wished, having tried to flee the UAE aboard a yacht in 2018 only for the boat to be intercepted off the coast of Goa, with the princess returned to the Emirates.
A 2018 video filmed on a phone smuggled into her “villa jail” recorded her saying she feared for her life.
Princess Shamsa, her sister, has not been seen publicly since she was taken from Cambridge by men working for her father and flown back to Dubai on a private jet.
