Coffee shop tycoon must pay brother’s widow £1.5million
A COFFEE shop entrepreneur has been given one last chance to avoid bankruptcy after losing a High Court battle over a £1.5million debt to his widowed sister-in-law.
Alistair McCallum-Toppin helped to build the AMT train station coffee shop into a £20million-a-year, 50-plus outlet chain with brothers Angus and Allan from one cart in Oxford in 1993.
But Angus died in 2006 from cancer, aged 45, and the family collapsed into “squabbling,” the High Court heard.
It is alleged the remaining brothers used the company as a personal “piggy-bank” while the financial rights of Angus’s widow Lucy and their two children were “ignored”.
Lucy, 44, was regarded as a something of a “gold-digger” by Alistair, said Judge Paul Matthews.
Ignored
The brothers were ordered last year by the court to buy Lucy and the children out of the company, putting them in line for a payout that lawyers said could be worth “up to £7million”.
Alistair, 52, and Allan, 56, were told to make a £1.5million interim payment last March. But in July, Lucy presented a bankruptcy petition targeting Alistair, the chain’s managing director, as the debt had not been paid.
Judge Matthews in last year’s High Court action slammed the conduct of the surviving brothers amid the “dysfunctional relationship of this family”.
He added: “It is clear that, during the time they have controlled the company after the death of Angus, Allan and Alistair have used the company as a piggy-bank to make personal expenditure at a high level.
“Once Angus had died, his estate was largely ignored and Lucy excluded.
“They ignored her existence and continued their own course.” He said Alistair had “refused to treat the estate holding Angus’ shares in the same way as he would have considered Angus himself”.
The judge continued: “There is evidence that he saw Lucy as a gold digger. He did not want to declare dividends that would benefit her.
“The conduct of the brothers has gone to enrich themselves. There were then incessant squabbles umpired by their mother Anna. No enterprise run on commercial principles would have organised the remuneration of directors on such chaotic lines.”
He found that the surviving brothers’ behaviour had been “unfairly prejudicial” to Lucy and Angus’s estate.
Now High Court Judge Daniel Schaffer has dismissed Alistair’s objections to the bankruptcy petition.
But he did not make an immediate order, saying he was giving Alistair “the opportunity to seek a deferral” by paying the money.