www. independent-bangladesh.comA group of Canadian and Arab investors has purchased five famed luxury hostelries in Kenya, including The Norfolk Hotel, Nairobi's oldest, and a fashionable safari lodge founded by a Hollywood movie star.

Lonrho Africa, a subsidiary of the British-based Lonrho conglomerate, said it had sold its Kenya hotel holdings to the three firms, including one headed by a Saudi royal, for 17 million pounds (32 million dollars, 29 million euros).

Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal's Kingdom Hotel Investments, which owns London's Dorchester among other top hotels, the Kuwait-based IFA Hotels and Canada's Fairmont Hotels and Resorts Inc bought the package and took control this week.

The group said in a statement that it planned multi-million-dollar refurbishments to the Norfolk, the Mount Kenya Safari Club, the Mara Safari Club, The Ark and the Aberdare Country Club within the next year.

"Following approximately 25 million dollars in enhancement, all five Kenyan properties will be re-named Fairmont in mid-2006," it said.

Kenya's economy depends largely on earnings from tourism and the five hotels covered by the deal have been mainstays of the east African nation's campaign to market high-end safaris to visitors from overseas.

The Norfolk, which opened in 1904, the year Nairobi was founded, was a colonial-era hotspot and watering hole for the infamous Happy Valley set, the community of British aristocrats, eccentrics and playboys whose loose living was the subject of James Fox's book "White Mischief."

A film of the book about a true-life 1941 murder mystery in which the Norfolk featured prominently was subsequently made by Michael Radford with Greta Scacchi, Joss Ackland, Charles Dance and Hugh Grant.

Visitors to the Norfolk have included former US president Theodore Roosevelt, who began what is still reputed to be the largest hunting safari ever in Kenya from the hotel, Boy Scouts founder Lord Baden-Powell, aviatrix Beryl Markham, Karen Blixen, who penned "Out of Africa", and a wealth of movie stars and starlets.

A bomb attack on the hotel on New Year's eve 1980, blamed on Palestinian extremists, killed some 15 people and wounded dozens more.

The Mount Kenya Safari Club, in the shadow of the mountain that gave Kenya its name, was founded in 1959 by matinee idol William Holden, who turned the posh camp into a retreat for European royalty and the merely rich and famous.