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The Aga Khan is to donate €40m (£27.4m) of his fortune to help restore France's largest privately owned estate, which includes a park, a Renaissance chateau, a racecourse and the biggest classical art collection in the country outside the Louvre.
The billionaire businessman and racehorse owner, who is a British citizen, will provide more than half of a €70m fund set up with the French state, the Institut de France - which owns the magnificent but badly decayed Chantilly estate - and local authorities.

According to Libération newspaper, France's highest legal authority, the Council of State, will approve the innovative private-public project. "Everyone's enthusiastic, everyone's grateful," an official told the Guardian. "It won't be very long now."

Covering nearly 8,000 hectares (20,000 acres) 25 miles north of Paris, Chantilly has three chateaux, the Great Stables (once home to 240 horses and 500 dogs), a forest and a landscaped park designed by André le Nôtre, the architect of the gardens of the Tuileries in Paris and Versailles.

The former royal estate's art collection includes works by Raphael, Filippino Lippi, Poussin and Ingres. It is also the spiritual home of horse racing in France and houses the country's best-known hippodrome.

But Chantilly has been sliding into disrepair since the death in 1897 of its last private owner, Henri d'Orléans, Duc d'Aumale, the last son of France's last king, Louis-Philippe.

The duke left it, under strict conditions, to the Institut de France, an august but cash-strapped organisation in charge of some 20 other French organisations including the Académie française. Among the duke's stipulations were that nothing was to be sold, nothing lent and no painting moved more than 10cm.

Under the aegis of the institut, whose entire annual budget is €5m, the estate is visited by just 300,000 people a year and runs at a permanent deficit of between €500,000 and €1.5m.

The Aga Khan, 68, spiritual leader of the world's 15m Ismaili Muslims, has lived and stabled his horses on the nearby Aiglemont estate for years. He became interested in Chantilly's fortunes a decade ago, when there was talk of its racecourse being closed. He called in two consulting companies and, with their help, came up with a plan to do up the entire estate. The 20-year Chantilly project, headed by a former senior local official, Hubert Monzat, should be running before the summer.

The Aga Khan, whose fortune has been estimated at €6bn, told Libération he hoped his small gift would be seen as "a special gesture in favour of the population in whose midst I have lived for several years".