Billionaire breaks silence on claim he'll spend '5,000 years' in tomb at £100m UK palace

The eccentric billionaire Nicholas van Hoogstraten has broken his silence on reports he planned to create an elaborate final resting place in his unfinished mansion, Hamilton Palace.

Hoogstraten rose to fame in the 1960s for his incredible wealth and criminal record, but has latterly become known for his sprawling neoclassical estate in Sussex, where building work ceased suddenly before completion in the late 1990s.

Breaking a 30-year silence on the project, the man who made his money through the ruthless expansion of a property empire denied the development was abandoned and claimed it would be completed, although he couldn't provide a timeframe.

Among the site's many mysteries is the idea that its mausoleum was designed to be some sort of pharaoh's tomb, where he would be laid to rest along with his prized collection of expensive antiques.

In a 2003 article on the property magnate, the BBC claimed he'd "designed a mausoleum in the east wing so that he could spend 5,000 years sealed in an impregnable tomb, locked away from the 'riff raff' as he frequently referred to the rest of society."

However, according to the man himself, the pharaoh's palace story, frequently parroted by different outlets online, is totally false.

The real explanation is a lot more mundane.

"A lawyer told us if part of the building is a mausoleum, you don't pay tax on it," Van Hoogstraten said.

It was abundantly clear, during an exclusive interview with the Express, that, far from having a meticulous plan for his legacy, the wealthy businessman didn't really care about death.

His son, Max Hamilton, 40, said: "It's one of those things you don't really talk about."

To which his father added mischievously: "I don't know. Where are you going to put me?"

The pair revealed that the mausoleum was always part of the building's structural design, which was copied from Buckingham Palace, where the basement is actually located on the ground floor.

It's one of many intricate features of the development, like a system where water flows from smaller ponds across the grounds to a large lake and then circulates back to the top.

Hoogstraten said he believed projects like Hamilton Palace don't really happen anymore because nobody has any "real money."

"I came from a time when you would work through parts of London, near Victoria, and you looked up at the first floor of a house and that's where you'd see real money. The days of real money and wealth were going by the 1970s."

These days he felt homes of the ultra wealthy were a pale imitation of the past.

"You'd be hard pushed to find any Louis XIV furniture anymore," he added.