Daily Mail

Threats, tax avoidance and Britain’s flashiest property tycoons

The Candy brothers love to flaunt their wealth. Now they’re fighting explosive court claims that shine a light on the murky underbelly of modern capitalism

- by Ruth Sunderland

THERE is only one potential problem for Holly Valance when she is sunbathing on her property tycoon husband Nick Candy’s £26 million superyacht: the voluptuous actress and pop singer suffers from seasicknes­s. That obstacle was soon overcome, however, after doting Candy called in TV hypnotist Paul McKenna to cure the 33-year-old former star of Aussie TV soap opera Neighbours.

Nothing was too much trouble, it seems, for the businessma­n when it came to creating the perfect floating palace for his wife. Every alteration was made to accommodat­e her. ‘The sun-deck was all wrong — everything was too small, the Jacuzzi, the seating. Inside, it was like a Russian tsar’s palace. I’m not saying that’s bad but it’s not my family’s style. It was too heavy, too classical and it was quite dark. We needed to de-wood it, basically,’ he told Boat Magazine.

The 63m(207 ft)-long vessel — built at the prestigiou­s Italian Benetti shipyard and named the ‘11.11’, after the November 11 birthday of daughter Luka, aged two — costs an estimated £2.6 million a year to run. At that price, Candy naturally wants everything to be just so.

After a make- over, the interior now has ‘an art- deco feel’ and features artworks including pieces by Tracey Emin.

What a lovely life on the ocean wave it must be — if only it were not for an explosive court case, in which the yacht plays a prominent role.

The lawsuit, brought by a former friend and business associate of Candy’s, raises embarrassi­ng questions about how he can afford a billionair­e lifestyle on his relatively modest stated income and wealth.

Is he really rich enough to maintain the yacht — and a £140 million penthouse in One Hyde Park, the luxury building in London’s Knightsbri­dge that he developed with his brother Christian?

Or are the siblings perhaps understati­ng the true extent of Nick’s fortune to thwart the taxman — as his opponent’s lawyer suggested in court? These questions, along with accusation­s of threats and conspiracy, are raised in a £132 million legal claim brought by Mark Holyoake, a onetime friend of Nick’s from their student days at Reading University. After the £250 million failure of his fish supply company British Seafood in 2010, Holyoake turned to the Candys for a £12 million loan to buy a property in London’s swanky Belgravia — an arrangemen­t which quickly turned sour.

Holyoake now accuses the Candys of menacing behaviour in the aftermath of the deal, while they say he immediatel­y defaulted on the loan. The case is at an early stage, but it threatens to be a serious embarrassm­ent for the Candy brothers.

Nick, 43, and Christian, 42, shot from nowhere to the heart of London’s billionair­e circles through their dealings in property.

Their trajectory began when the two men from a middle-class home in Surrey, then in their 20s, borrowed £6,000 from their grandmothe­r for a deposit to buy and renovate a small flat in Earl’s Court, which they sold at a huge profit in the late Nineties.

That humble start was enough, apparently, to set them on the road to developing multi-million-pound boltholes for assorted oligarchs, sheikhs and other members of the ultra-wealthy internatio­nal set. Rivals have looked on in wonderment at the brothers’ amazingly rapid rise.

Nonetheles­s, the pair now move in the social stratosphe­re, counting Prince Albert of Monaco, Kylie Minogue and Formula 1 baron Bernie Ecclestone among their friends and acquaintan­ces.

The Candys give every appearance of being members of the billionair­es’ club themselves. But, discomfiti­ngly for them, their affairs are brought under close scrutiny in the court case, where the judge has raised questions over the real value of their assets and the organisati­on of their UK and offshore businesses.

Mr Justice Nugee has barred the brothers from disposing of any assets worth more than £5 million outside the normal course of business without giving seven days’ notice to Holyoake’s lawyers.

The shackles placed on the pair are to prevent them from shunting assets out of their official ownership to protect them from being seized if the lawsuit is successful.

Defying the order would mean that they risk heavy punishment­s, including jail.

As we shall see, this is a case that throws a harsh light on the tawdry state of capitalism in Britain today, where business is routinely conducted through offshore companies and it is often impossible to discern whether someone is genuinely super-rich or in fact owes millions.

Mark Holyoake, the Candys’ accuser, is himself a controvers­ial businessma­n with a chequered past that includes his £ 250 million business failure and a Serious Fraud Office probe, which was dropped without charges in 2013. He says the Candys ran a vicious campaign of abuse and menace, including what he believed were implied threats against his pregnant wife, Emma, in order to recoup the debt he owed them.

The brothers deny making threats. They also deny suggestion­s that they have not told the truth about Nick’s financial affairs and how their business empire is divided between them.

Whoever is in the right, the case lays out accusation­s about the Candys that cast the duo in a decidedly unflatteri­ng light.

One accusation is that their claim they split their business into two parts a decade ago is a fiction aimed at dodging UK tax.

The Candys say the property developmen­t side, the most lucrative part of their empire, is run by Christian through a Guernsey-based company called CPC Group.

Guernsey is a well-known tax haven, but Christian says CPC pays corporatio­n tax in the UK.

The less valuable interior design and project management operation, is, they say, managed out of London by Nick — who has nothing to do with the Guernsey side. Holyoake’s lawyers, however, argue Nick has been receiving secret dividends from Christian’s Guernsey-based business, under the guise of loans and gifts. These are said to have included substantia­l presents of cash, plus two properties worth a combined £200 million.

‘We claim that the financial position of Nick Candy is being falsely stated. It’s all a matter of tax evasion,’ Holyoake’s QC Anthony Trace said in court.

The truth of this has not been determined. The case does, however, put the Candys’ extensive offshore operations under a microscope.

A diagram of the corporate structure supplied to the court showed they have no fewer than 140 companies, many of them in tax havens.

Both brothers claim they live in the UK and are resident here for tax purposes, though Christian has until recently been living as a tax exile in Monaco. The Candys say Holyoake is intent on dragging them through the mud with no justificat­ion.

They argue that his allegation­s about them are ‘slanderous and entirely false’.

Holyoake, they say, has relied on court privilege ‘in the full knowledge he would immediatel­y be subject to a defamation action if he made them (his allegation­s) outside of court’.

Inconvenie­ntly for them, though, the judge noted that the brothers’ claims that Nick has no interest in the Guernsey operations ‘may not tell the whole truth’.

He also observed that ‘there is a disconnect between the lavish billionair­e lifestyle that Mr Nicholas Candy appears to be able to afford, including living in an opulent apartment and purchasing a luxury yacht, and any apparent means to finance that lifestyle’.

He added: ‘A person who publicly flaunts his wealth, but whose

They began with a £6,000 loan from grandma One generous gift was a £100million row of houses

declared holdings in his corporate interests do not begin to justify the wealth which he displays, is open to the charge he is willing to say one thing and do something else.’

The observatio­n that the Candys flaunt their apparent wealth is, if anything, an understate­ment.

When it comes to ostentatio­us display, the brothers are in a league of their own. The 85 super-luxe flats at their flagship One Hyde Park complex — designed by renowned architect Lord (Richard) Rogers and known around the world for its opulent crash pads for the billionair­e classes — are a byword for bling.

The developmen­t, which was financed with the help of secretive Qatari investors, provides everything an oligarch could wish for, including private cinema, wine-tasting facility, squash court, spa and 21m swimming pool.

The apartments were sold for a total of around £1.5 billion or £7,500 a square foot, making them the most expensive ever, anywhere in the world. Neither Candy brother could be described as convention­ally handsome, but both have beautiful wives.

Nick and pop star Holly’s wedding in 2013 was a £3 million extravagan­za in Beverly Hills, with the couple playing host to friends from the worlds of celebrity and aristocrac­y.

The nuptials were attended by Simon Cowell and Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie. In his bachelor days, Nick bunked down with Christian in a £200 million Monaco penthouse called La Belle Epoque. The pair owned a powerboat named Catch Me If You Candy. For wheels, they could choose from a Rolls-Royce Phantom, a Rolls-Royce Convertibl­e, a Mercedes SLR McLaren, a 430 Ferrari Spider, a 575 Ferrari Maranello, two Range Rovers, a Cherokee Jeep and, incongruou­sly, a Renault Clio.

Christian’s wife is Emily Crompton, 34, who before her marriage was an adornment of the London social scene. Her exboyfrien­ds include Prince Charles’s stepson Tom Parker Bowles.

She and Christian have threeyear- old twins, Cayman Charles Wolf and Isabella Monaco Evanthia — names which the family insist have nothing to do with the tax havens through which the twins’ father conducts so much of his affairs.

Like his brother, Christian is fond of keeping his wife in high style.

One of his gifts to her was a whole row of houses on one of London’s most prestigiou­s streets near Regent’s Park. Emily is, according to court papers, a very upmarket landlady indeed.

She is the sole proprietor of a string of Regency houses — Numbers 6 to 10 Cambridge Terrace — with a 150- year lease granted last July by the Crown Estate Commission­ers. Her husband is believed to have paid around £100 million for the properties, which are Grade-I listed and were designed by John Nash, the architect of Buckingham Palace.

Wealthy men, of course, are free to shower their wives with as many valuable presents as they choose.

But in the court case, it was suggested Christian may not have been motivated by generosity when he gave the houses to his wife, but by a desire to keep them if he loses the lawsuit.

He says the move was for ‘legitimate personal and commercial reaons’. Indeed, the papers show Emily is now giving them back to him as part of another property deal.

For their part, the Candys say they do not expect to lose the case. They describe Holyoake’s claims as ‘fabricated’ and say his account of threats to his family and himself is ‘distastefu­l, inflammato­ry and totally untrue’

Holyoake is, they say, bent on ‘shameless and unwarrante­d attempts to extract money’ from them. The rights and wrongs of this case are shrouded in a fog of claim and countercla­im.

The Candy brothers are not to everyone’s taste — but neither is Holyoake. Indeed, until now he was best-known in the City for the spectacula­r collapse of British Seafood, a business he set up to buy fish in the Far East to supply diners in Europe. The company went into administra­tion in 2010, leaving unpaid debts amounting to around £253 million and very angry creditors and investors baying for blood.

Among these was venture capital group 3i, which believed it had been duped into investing by Holyoake — partly on the basis that one of his suppliers supposedly had ‘the best haddock facility in the world’.

According to reports at the time, the venture capitalist­s claimed it did not have any haddock facility at all.

A spokesman for Holyoake said these claims were ‘ false and ludicrous’. 3i reached a confidenti­al settlement out of court.

The downfall of British Seafood led to an investigat­ion by the Serious Fraud Office, but the probe was terminated in 2013 with no charges.

Holyoake’s spokesman said he has a ‘lengthy track record in successful property developmen­t’, and it would be ‘unfair and wrong’ to define him by that failure.

Holyoake now lives on Ibiza with his wife, Emma.

He claims that, in a conversati­on he had with Christian Candy, the latter asked after Emma’s health in such a tone that it implied a threat to her and her unborn child.

Candy allegedly was aware Emma was pregnant at the time and had previously suffered a miscarriag­e.

Holyoake also says he was warned by Nick Candy that if he did not do everything Christian wanted, the latter would pass on his debt to ‘certain people, potentiall­y Russians’.

These people, Nick is alleged to have said, ‘ would not think twice about hurting Mr Holyoake or his family to get what they wanted’.

The Candys say the threat is ‘fabricatio­n’ and dismiss these claims as nothing more than a ‘shakedown’ to ‘extract money’ from them.

‘Mark Holyoake has an extensive record of litigation and a history of unpaid creditors who believe they were deceived and misled,’ the brothers added.

The Candys became commercial­ly entangled with Holyoake when he tried to buy a property in Grosvenor Gardens in London’s Belgravia, which came on the market in 2010.

Holyoake believed that once the property was redevelope­d he could make a huge profit on the site — but he needed cash to start the project.

After the British Seafood collapse, raising the required amount from mainstream banks was not going to be easy. In 2011, he approached the Candy brothers, who lent him £12 million over two years, at a whopping 20 per cent interest rate, perhaps reflecting their view of the risk they might not get their cash back. However, Holyoake says it reflects the fact that this was not a straightfo­rward loan but a long-term venture.

He says his losses on the transactio­n add up to £132 million. The Candys claim Holyoake ‘ defaulted on the loan from day one’, and they expect ‘total vindicatio­n’ through the courts. Whichever side prevails, neither the Candys nor Holyoake seem likely to emerge with reputation­s unscathed in the court of public opinion.

Thanks to the skills of hypnotist Paul McKenna, Holly Valance Candy can now recline on the deck of her yacht without feeling queasy.

Unfortunat­ely, the same cannot be said for anyone following this very sordid court case.

Beatrice and Eugenie were at their wedding

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 ??  ?? Power couples: Holly and Nick, left, and Christian and Emily, right. Inset: The luxury yacht 11.11
Power couples: Holly and Nick, left, and Christian and Emily, right. Inset: The luxury yacht 11.11
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