Horton Priory: The Engelhorn Family, Nazi-Era Profits and the Mystery of a Liechtenstein Trust

An ancient Kent priory, a wealthy German industrial family, a Liechtenstein trust and a business history reaching back to Nazi Germany. Shepway Vox has followed the ownership trail of Horton Priory. But the most important names are still missing from the public records.

A £4.7 million mystery in the Kent countryside

Horton Priory, near Sellindge (pictured), has stood for almost 900 years. Founded between 1121 and 1135, it was once home to a community of monks. Today, it is a private country estate with links to one of Europe’s wealthiest industrial families: the Engelhorns.

Documents obtained by Shepway Vox show that Horton Priory was part of a £4,704,175 property purchase on 30 June 2014.

But the buyer named on the Land Registry is not a person.

It is IMT Trust Services AG, a company based in Liechtenstein, acting as trustee of the Harwood Trust.

The purchase covered three land titles: K784955, K784948 and K784958. The £4.7 million was therefore not simply the price of the main house.

There is another financial connection. In August 2015, a charge was registered against the estate in favour of LGT Bank AG, also based in Liechtenstein. The register does not say how much was borrowed or whether any money is still owed.

The Engelhorn family connection

So who is behind this historic estate?

Local residents have told the Shepway Vox team that Kurt Alexander Engelhorn and his wife Carmen (pictured) have been seen at Horton Priory.

There is also documentary evidence linking a couple with strikingly similar names to the property.

An archaeological investigation published by the Kent Archaeological Society thanks Curt and Carmen Englehorn for commissioning work at Horton Priory and helping the archaeologists.

The archaeological work was carried out ahead of plans to build a swimming pool and an orangery at Horton Priory. The applicant was the Harwood Trust, under planning application Y15/1301/SH, submitted to the then Shepway District Council. Crucially, the architectural drawings prepared by Purcell explicitly name Kurt Engelhorn as the client, providing direct documentary evidence of his personal involvement in the development, despite the application being submitted in the name of the Harwood Trust.

Their names appear in the report’s acknowledgments.

Company records provide another connection.

Horton Priory Management Limited was set up in October 2014. One of its directors is Dr Erek Bertram Nuener, whose name also appears alongside Kurt Alexander Engelhorn and IMT Trust Services AG in Companies House records for another overseas property-holding business, Daribor Establishment.

Daribor is separate from Horton Priory, but the same people and companies appear in both sets of records.

There is also a separate Liechtenstein trust called The Kurt Alexander Engelhorn Trust.

It was established on 3 April 2014, less than three months before Horton Priory’s purchase. Its trustee was also IMT Trust Services AG.

This is a different trust from Harwood. No document we have found proves that the two trusts share beneficiaries or that Kurt’s named trust paid for Horton Priory.

How can you enjoy a house without owning it on paper?

This is where things get interesting.

The documentary The Spider’s Web: Britain’s Second Empire explains how trusts can separate the people named as legal owners from those who enjoy or benefit from valuable property.

The explanation is simple.

Imagine you own a house.

You put it into a trust. Another person, often a lawyer, or a company becomes the legal owner. They hold the property under the trust’s rules.

Depending on those rules, you or your family could continue living in the house, using it or benefiting financially from it.

Yet your name need never appear on the title deed.

A trust usually involves three roles. The settlor puts the assets into the trust. The trustee holds and manages them. The beneficiaries are the people who may enjoy those assets or receive money from them.

Some trusts also have a protector, who can have powers over the trustees.

 

In his 2017 report, Trusts: Weapons of Mass Injustice?, tax justice researcher Andres Knobel explains how trusts split ownership and control between different people.

The legal owner may be easy to identify. Finding out who actually benefits from the assets can be much harder.

Knobel warns that some trusts can protect wealth from creditors, make tax investigations more difficult and hide who really controls valuable property.

He also acknowledges that trusts have perfectly legitimate uses, including looking after vulnerable family members.

There is no evidence that the Harwood Trust has broken the law or avoided tax. But its structure leaves one important question unanswered: who ultimately benefits from Horton Priory?

A family fortune with a dark history

The Engelhorn family fortune dates back to Friedrich Engelhorn, who founded German chemical giant BASF in 1865.

His descendants later controlled the pharmaceutical company Boehringer Mannheim.

BASF became part of IG Farben in 1925, decades after Friedrich had sold his interests.

During the Second World War, IG Farben made money from Nazi Germany’s war economy.

Its products supported Hitler’s military operations. The company seized Jewish property and forced concentration camp prisoners to work at Auschwitz-Monowitz.

BASF’s own historical research estimates that around 25,000 prisoners died in connection with forced labour at the IG Farben plant.

IG Farben also owned 42.5% of Degesch, the company that marketed Zyklon B, the poison the Nazis used to murder more than a million people, overwhelmingly Jews.

That corporate connection is well documented. It does not prove that the Engelhorn family personally made money from Zyklon B sales.

However, the family’s separate wartime business history also raises troubling questions.

In July 2026, Marlene Engelhorn, from another branch of the family, told Swiss newspaper WOZ that Boehringer Mannheim had worked with the Nazi regime and profited from it.

She acknowledged the links between Nazi-era persecution and her family’s wealth.

That admission came from within the family itself. What remains unclear is how much those wartime activities contributed to the fortune inherited by later generations.

From Bermuda to Liechtenstein

In 1997, Swiss pharmaceutical company Roche agreed to buy the Engelhorn family’s business interests through Corange Ltd, a holding company based in Bermuda.

The deal was worth approximately $11 billion (£7bn).

Newspaper reports at the time identified offshore trusts holding substantial interests for the Engelhorn family.

Seventeen years later, Horton Priory’s £4.7 million purchase was registered through a Liechtenstein trustee.

There is no evidence proving that money from the Roche sale, or profits made during the Nazi era, paid for the Kent estate, nor are we suggesting this is the case either for clarity.

Who benefits from Horton Priory?

IMT Trust Services AG, acting as trustee of the Harwood Trust. is based in Liechtenstein, a country long associated with offshore banking, financial secrecy and tax havens. The company is also registered on the UK’s Register of Overseas Entities.

So we know who legally owns Horton Priory – IMT Trust Services AG acting as trustee of the Harwood Trust. But the evidence now points much more firmly towards Kurt and Carmen Engelhorn as the people benefiting from the estate.

The strongest evidence comes from the planning documents.

Architects Purcell explicitly named Kurt Engelhorn as their client on drawings prepared for the proposed swimming pool, orangery and alterations to Horton Priory. Yet the formal planning applicant was the Harwood Trust.

Archaeology South-East also publicly thanked Kurt and Carmen Englehorn for commissioning archaeological work at the property. Local residents have independently told Shepway Vox that Kurt and Carmen Engelhorn have been seen at the estate.

Taken together with the company records and the family’s other Liechtenstein trust arrangements, these findings provide compelling evidence of the couple’s personal involvement with Horton Priory.

But there is an important legal distinction.

As the documentary The Spider’s Web: Britain’s Second Empire and Andres Knobel’s research explain, trusts can separate legal ownership from the people who enjoy, benefit from or exercise control over valuable property.

That appears particularly relevant here.

The evidence strongly suggests that Kurt and Carmen Engelhorn are among those enjoying the benefits of Horton Priory. However, without the Harwood Trust’s documents, we cannot confirm whether either is formally named as a beneficiary, who established the trust or who ultimately controls it.

The Land Registry names IMT Trust Services AG, acting as trustee of the Harwood Trust. It does not name Kurt or Carmen Engelhorn as legal owners.

Nearly 900 years after Horton Priory was founded, its legal ownership is there for anyone to check. Finding out who ultimately benefits from it is another matter.

We know whose name is on the deeds. We know Kurt Engelhorn was named as the architect’s client. We know the couple have been linked directly to work at the property.

The evidence points strongly towards the Engelhorn family.

But one final question remains: are Kurt and Carmen the Harwood Trust’s named beneficiaries, or does the trust serve other members of the family too?

Until those details are disclosed, the full picture remains hidden behind the trust.

There are legitimate uses for offshore companies and trusts. The inclusion of a person or entity in this article is not intended to suggest or imply that they have engaged in illegal or improper conduct.

The Shepway Vox Team

Not Owned By Barons, Hedgefunds Or Offshore