€13 million Wardija villa court auction over Swiss loan call-in

A Wardija villa with land of over 15,000 square metres will go under the hammer of a court auction at an estimated value of €13.6 million, a court has declared.

The villa, formerly ‘Casa Sant Manduca’, originated as a country hunting lodge used by the Knights of St John and the Maltese nobility around the early 1600s, when Wardija was a densely forested area used for hunting grounds.

The land in the area is still partly the property of the Manduca Piscopo Macedonia Zamit noble family, holders of the Mont’Alto and Buleben barony, which includes the small church of Our Lady of the Forsaken.

The villa is expected to be auctioned by court order, as part of the execution of a Swiss decision that called in a loan by UCB Suisse, now part of the BNP Paribas group, to the company T.A.M. Holdings, in which businessman Paul Hili is a main shareholder.

According to the various court decisions, first starting in Geneva in 2015 and recently confirmed on appeal in 2017, Hili and T.A.M. have been called to pay back a €4.5 million loan, which was hypothecated against Hili’s Wardija villa.

Today the house has been changed, and includes horse stables, a carport, a tennis court, swimming pool, lawns and gardens.

The house also has a water mill, which was probably purposely located in the area due to the presence of a perched water table, that would have been used to irrigate the surrounding fields.

The mill actually leads to a series of underground chambers and a tunnel system that were originally hand-hewn right above the perched water table level, some 24 metres below ground level.