Focus: For sale: nest eggs of the rich and famous (cash offers only)

It was a property-for-sale advertisement in the Palm Beach Daily News last week that gave it away. One of the town's wealthiest residents - and there are many of them, from Rod Stewart to the Revlon tycoon Ronald Perelman - was packing to leave. The reason was not hard to divine. The owner of this especially spectacular beachfront house is Conrad Black. And, as everybody knows, he urgently needs to raise cash.

This is no ordinary seaside spread. The sliver of land that makes the barrier island just off the mainland at Palm Beach in Florida is dotted with mansions of astonishing grandeur and pretension. The one at 1930 South Ocean Boulevard, however, that has belonged to Black and his wife, Barbara Amiel, since 1997, is considered one of the most opulent. There is no price mentioned in the advertisement. But, reportedly, Black hopes to sell it for $36m (£19.6m) - a nice mark-up on the $9.9m he paid for it.

Black has collected fine homes over the years. There is the 11-bedroom townhouse near Kensington Palace in London, the mansion in Toronto and the luxury apartment on New York's Park Avenue. Collectors are meant to accumulate more, not sell and dispense. But downsizing has been forced on Black since he was ousted in November as chief executive officer of Hollinger International amid allegations of improper payments made to himself and to some associates.

It is possible that Black and Amiel have simply grown tired of Palm Beach and its cocktail and caviar ways. But that is not what you see on their faces in the photograph of both them that will appear in next month's Vanity Fair. Accompanying a lengthy article about the concentration of money and pedigree along the stretch of Ocean Boulevard, the snap shows the two of them posed graciously in front of some statuary on their surf-side front lawn.

Black needs money to finance the lawyers to fend off an ongoing investigation into what happened at Hollinger by the Securities and Exchange Commission in the United States and to fight the many lawsuits against him that are expected to surface. More immediately, he has agreed to pay $7.2m of the unauthorised payments back to the company. He recently missed a deadline to make a first instalment of $850,000, and was given an extension until the middle of this month.

Black is a rich man. But most of his wealth is said to be tied up in Hollinger shares. Selling them would be fraught and complicated - so the property collection must go, or at least a large part of it. As well as selling the Palm Beach mansion, Black is understood to have received unsolicited offers for the Kensington house. He has yet to put it on the market, but could expect it to raise as much as $25m. There is no word about the fate of his homes in New York or his native Toronto.

"Thank heavens for priceless assets in hard times" will be the motto of another publishing family looking to sell precious goods to raise money this winter. Last week, the children of the late Malcolm Forbes revealed that Sotheby's will auction off his fabled collection of nine Fabergé Imperial Easter eggs from tsarist Russia, second in size only to the 10 eggs within the confines of the Kremlin. When the eggs and another 180 Fabergé objects go under the hammer in April, they might fetch as much as $90m.

The Forbes scions may need the money less urgently than does Black. But their decision to sell comes at a time when Forbes Magazine, the family's main holding, has suffered a 50 per cent drop in advertising over three years. "We're trying to make sure the real jewel - Forbes and Forbes.com - stays within the family," said Christopher Forbes, vice-chairman of the company. "None of us are getting any younger. It was a great passion of Pop's, and we have had a great time owning these objects."

Fortunately for the Forbes siblings, the market for the eggs seems good. In 2002, Christie's sold another Fabergé piece, the Imperial Winter Egg, for $9.5m. The family may be facing financial strains, but the timing may be more to do with the prospect of achieving stratospheric bids. There will be some sadness when the gavel is wielded, however. It is likely that after the auctionthe eggs will never be together again.

Sadness undoubtedly awaits Conrad and Barbara also. There is nothing modest about the 17,000sq ft mansion in Palm Beach to which they would habitually jet in wintertime aboard Black's private Gulfstream plane. The house sits on almost an acre of land and features a ceramic-tiled tunnel that passes under Ocean Boulevard to a stretch of private beachfront on the other side. Inside, meanwhile, are fine paintings, including an original Andy Warhol painting of Marilyn Monroe, and luxurious furniture. On the second floor, hangs a gold-fringed American flag that Franklin D Roosevelt once had hanging behind his desk at the White House. Black's own biography of FDR, Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom, has just been published. He is said to have spent $8m of Hollinger money to acquire many of the former president's letters and other private documents.

The newspaper advertisement for the house sale boasts of the tunnel as well as of a "dramatic stairwell", a library, exercise room, two-storey guest house, private cinema and pool with cabana. Since buying it, Black has renovated the house, adding the pool cabana. Only 30 years old, the property was appraised for tax purposes by the county at $17m in 2002. Black paid taxes on that, which amounted to a little more than a third of a million dollars. Other details for any prospective buyer: the mansion has its own lift, marble floors, nine bathrooms, six bedrooms and a three-car garage.

Local estate agents agree that the mansion is one of the three most desirable in Palm Beach. Most also expect that he will have no trouble attracting a price close to what he is asking. "It is spectacular," said Linda Gary, who specialises in properties for the very rich. "It truly is. It is just an eloquent home."

Even Black himself once conceded that the degree of luxury inside could be construed as over-the-top. "It isn't everyone's cup of tea," he said. "Some people are offended by the extreme opulence, but I find it sort of entertaining."