The Independent reports that billionaire financier Nat Rothschild has planned a £1m 40th birthday bash in a tiny Adriatic hotspot.

This week, it was Monte Carlo. Next week, Montenegro. Nat Rothschild, who has one of the best financial brains in a family renowned for business acumen, will be 40 next Tuesday, and intends to make this a weekend to remember.

The financier is rumoured to be splashing out £1m on a birthday bash. That is small change for a man whose personal wealth is reckoned to be about a thousand times that amount. And the little state of Montenegro is understandably delighted to be chosen as the venue.

Montenegro is a staggeringly beautiful, mountain statelet onn the c oast of the Adriatic, only just more than half the size of Wales with a population of 660,000, slightly more than that of Glasgow. It has been an independent state only since 2006, when its people voted in a referendum to sever their union with Serbia. It is probably best known to the British public as the supposed setting of the film Casino Royale, though most of it was actually shot in the Czech Republic.

Uniquely for a sovereign state, Montenegro has no currency. All transactions are conducted in euros though it is not in the EU or the eurozone. This peculiarity has made it a magnet for Russian oligarchs, and for people who want to disguise the source of their wealth, such as Irish drug barons.

It is also open for those with legitimate business interests, including Nat Rothschild, who will be combining with pleasure by flying his guests in to see for themselves the attractions of the Bay of Kotor, one of Europe’s finest natural harbours, tucked between the mountains of Montenegro.

Mr Rothschild and his main business partner, the Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, have sunk a lot of money in to the fresh concrete that has been laid on the water’s edge in Kotor Bay. The British media will obviously focus its attention on who is or is not a guest at the Rothschild bash, because the only social event of the summer to match this one was last week’s wedding of the billionaire Prince Albert of Monaco to the former Olympic swimmer Charlene Wittstock.

Eager to whet everyone’s curiosity, Porto Montenegro’s sales and marketing director, Colin Kingsmill, has told journalists that invitations have gone to “the ritziest, wealthiest, and most photogenic people on earth”.

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