As you ride the famous Savoleyres bubble lift out of Verbier, the Swiss ski resort that acts as a magnet to royals, tycoons and (until lately) moneyed Russians, it is possible to feast your eyes on some of Europe’s most exclusive ski chalets.
The higher you get, the bigger and posher these great Alpine schlosses become until, just before you reach the snow-covered pistes, you pass the biggest and poshest of the lot: a stonking pile called Trois Couronnes — ‘three crowns’.
Spread across a trio of buildings, interlinked with what estate agents call a ‘vaulted art gallery and banqueting hall’, the eight-bedroom property was billed as ‘one of the finest properties in the Alps’ and valued at an astonishing £28 million when it was finished a decade ago.
It boasts two kitchens, eight bathrooms, an indoor pool — decorated with Italian mosaic and covered with a retractable glass floor — an outdoor Jacuzzi, sauna, hammam, spa and ‘relaxation area’, plus a cinema, glass-walled wine cellar and cigar room.
The interior designers who kitted the place out didn’t do things by halves, either.
Instead, they ‘travelled from Florence and Austria to Paris and Belgium collecting antique pieces, fine art, gothic fireplaces, natural stone fountains and washbasins, a soapstone oven, old wood panelling, floors and ceilings from the 18th and 19th century, forged iron chandeliers, 19th-century elevator doors and other signature pieces’.
Karl Komarek, who this week won the licence to run the National Lottery, pictured with his wife Stepanka
In almost every room, chairs and beds are now covered with expensive fur. On the floor of the master bedroom is a rug made from the pelt of an entire polar bear.
Meanwhile, staff include a concierge, a Michelin-star chef, a sommelier and a team of maids who not only pack the bags of departing guests but also fold their clothes in golden tissue paper.
In high season, if the owner isn’t about, it rents for almost half a million pounds a week.
Chalet Trois Couronnes is, one might conclude, the sort of monument to untrammelled excess that a newly-minted lottery winner might call home. And this week, that became quite literally the case.
On Tuesday, the British Government announced that it was handing the next licence to run our National Lottery to a 53-year-old Czech billionaire named Karel Komarek.
He, according to public records, chooses to run a significant portion of his business empire from the palatial Verbier residence.
It is one of a string of luxury piles that Komarek and 45-year-old second wife Stepanka have divided time between over recent years. These include a stately home half an hour’s drive from Prague, a hillside retreat above Lake Geneva, and Villa Lumina, a prominent mansion in Palm Beach, the celebrity enclave off the coast of Florida which he sold last year for $26.2 million (£18.8 million).
Not bad, one might say, for a man who grew up in a two-bedroom flat in Hodonin, a mining town near the border of Slovakia, during the dark days of the Cold War.
Komarek, whose wealth is today estimated at anything from £4 billion to £6 billion, began building his fortune in the aftermath of the 1989 ‘Velvet Revolution’ that saw the collapse of communism in his homeland.
With the help of a $10,000 (£6,500) loan from his father, who had run state-owned enterprises before the Iron Curtain fell, he set up a firm selling industrial parts.
Chalet Trois Couronnes, in Verbier, is one of a string of properties Komarek and his second wife have chosen to divide their time
It soon expanded into oil and gas, and today his empire has interests in tourism, property, technology, private jets, and firms that run lottery and other gambling ventures in Austria, Greece, Italy, and Cyprus.
With wealth has come power, and during his successful pursuit of the lottery licence, which runs for a decade from 2024 and is likely to generate around £400 million in profits, Komarek added several members of the British establishment to his payroll.
They include Lord Coe, the former athlete and Tory MP who sits on the advisory board of one of his gambling firms Sazka; Justin King, the former Sainsbury’s CEO; Brent Hoberman, the occasional Tory donor who founded lastminute.com; and Sir Keith Mills, an air-miles tycoon and old chum of Boris Johnson.
The hiring spree came while the three rival bidders, including incumbent Camelot, were signing up lobbyists and PR firms to help them navigate the Gambling Commission’s lengthy bidding process. But it didn’t stop Komarek facing awkward questions as the race for the lottery entered its home straight.
Particularly tricky, on this front, were the Czech tycoon’s ties to Gazprom, the Russian energy giant which is majority-owned by the Kremlin and has been targeted in the wake of Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Komarek started doing business with Gazprom in 2013 when his company MND (Moravske Naftove Doly) partnered with them to build a new underground gas storage facility in the South Moravian region of his homeland. It opened in 2016.
Posing with Gazprom’s then deputy CEO, the oligarch Alexander Medvedev, Komarek issued a PR statement saying: ‘Gazprom is our strategic partner . . . In future we are planning new joint projects not only in the Czech Republic, but also in Europe and the Russian Federation.’
Today, that sort of talk may come back to haunt you. Uefa, European football’s governing body, recently ended its sponsorship deals with Gazprom for the Champions League and Euro 2024, as did the German club Schalke.
Downing Street has stressed that Russia ‘must be treated like a pariah state and businesses should think very carefully if they are still continuing to do anything that props up the Putin regime’.
Elsewhere, MND also invested in Vemex, a natural gas trader and retailer controlled by the Kremlin
