THE Duke of York has sold Sunninghill Park, the marital home that was a wedding gift from the Queen, for £15m.

Newly disclosed Land Registry documents contradict previous claims that Prince Andrew was forced into a knockdown price of £6m to £7m after the house had languished on the market for four years.

The new owner of Sunninghill Park in Ascot is said to be a businessman from Kazakhstan, although his identity is concealed behind an offshore company.

For Andrew the sale is a triumph of sorts. His mother gave him the 12-bedroom mansion as a present for his wedding in 1986 to Sarah Ferguson, but within five years the couple had parted and the house became a white elephant.

He put it up for sale a year after he was allocated Royal Lodge, a pink-washed gothic-style lodge in Windsor Great Park, after the death of the Queen Mother in 2002.

However, the revelation of Andrew’s windfall is likely to fuel fresh criticism of his lifestyle. Friends say none of the £15m has gone to his former wife, even though she received a modest divorce settlement of £300,000.

Andrew is a double winner because he was allowed to buy a 75-year lease on Royal Lodge for £1m when market estimates value it at £20m. In return for carrying out a multi-million-pound refurbishment with his own money, the Crown Estate also allowed Andrew to waive an annual rent of £250,000. He now lives there with his daughters Beatrice and Eugenie.

Their mother bought a property about a mile away last year.

She has since proved herself an astute businesswoman capable of earning up to £2.5m a year.

Sunninghill, which was designed for the couple by Sir James Dunbar-Nasmith in 1987, was said to have deterred potential buyers with its unappealing exterior, likened to a Tesco superstore Last year it was reported that the duke, who became the property’s sole owner after his divorce in 1996, had lowered the £10m asking price in order to secure a sale.

The revelation of the sale price surprised experts. Trevor Kent, a property commentator, said: “It sounds a very strong price for what the property was actually like.”

The Land Registry lists the new owner as Unity Assets Corporation, incorporated in the British Virgin Islands, and gives the address of a London solicitor, Magwells, as a contact.

Paresh Chohan, a partner at Magwells, who was said by the firm to be handling the client, did not respond to messages.

Sources said this weekend that the new owner may intend to turn Sunninghill into a hotel complex, although no planning application has been lodged with the Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead.

Andrew, who is given an allowance of £250,000 a year by the Queen and has an annual expenses bill of approximately £350,000 in his role as a roving ambassador for British business, has often been accused of using his trips to sample the greens and fairways on the world’s top golf courses.

Last month Dai Davies, the former head of Scotland Yard’s royalty protection squad, criticised the allocation of officers to protect Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie as a “gross abuse of taxpayers’ money”.

A spokesman for Andrew declined to comment on the sale. “This is a private matter,” he said.

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