Tycoon bugged his son’s school bag to spy on ex in £69m divorce fight
AN AIRCRAFT tycoon hired a private detective to plant a secret recording device in his eight-year-old son’s school bag so he could spy on his ex-wife.
clive Joy-Morancho, 59, tried to use the covert recordings in the bitter six-year battle to protect his £69million fortune from her.
Nichola Joy, 50, has now made a criminal complaint for breach of privacy, which carries a maximum sentence of a year in prison or a £40,000 fine.
She said: ‘it’s saddening and devastating. it breaks my heart. the children see what their father is doing to their mother, and they are suffering.’
the pair, who have three children now aged seven, ten and 12, split up in 2011 following a fiveyear marriage. Ever since, they have been fighting an acrimonious divorce battle over the money he made leasing aircraft.
British-born Mrs Joy is demanding a £27million share in assets including at least two London homes, a charter plane, a six-bedroom french chateau, a caribbean villa and a plot of land in a Swiss ski village.
Many of Mr Joy-Morancho’s assets are tied up in an offshore trust – revealed in the Panama Papers leak – to which he claims he does not have access.
A judge ruled in 2015 that his £20million classic car collection, made up of 35 cars including a McLaren f1 and McLaren P1, is protected by the trust.
Mr Joy-Morancho has taken part in classic car races at the Good- wood circuit in West Sussex and at Spa in Belgium.
Photographs show him driving cars including a ferrari 250 LM worth up to £10.6million, a vintage Porsche 911 with the numberplate ‘911 Joy’ and a 1955 Jaguar Dtype. in June last year a judge in the court of Appeal upheld a ruling to award Mrs Joy £120,000 per year in maintenance and £340,000 in legal fees. Mr Joy-Morancho, who was born in Zimbabwe, has claimed he will suffer financial ruin if he is forced to meet his exwife’s demands.
Mrs Joy’s lawyer, ronald Sokol, said: ‘Nikki’s main concern is her three children. She is appalled at how their father uses them as a means of putting pressure on her.
‘He tried to use what he found in the recording device to discredit his wife, but the judge himself said it wasn’t relevant. He’s tried to use it in french courts as well.
‘We have a letter from the detective saying that he did it and that Mr Joy-Morancho asked him to do it.’
Mr Joy-Morancho lives at chateau de Tournefort, an hour north of Marseilles, and his wife lives in the same area.
The recording device was planted in their son’s school bag ‘to ascertain what was happening within the household while the children were with their mother’ and it was in the bag for a total of 20 days.
Mrs Joy has reported her ex-husband to the public prosecutor in france for a breach of privacy, and the investigation is continuing.
it will determine if he ‘wilfully violated’ his ex-wife’s privacy by ‘intercepting, recording or transmitting words uttered in confidential or private circumstances’.
English courts said the recordings were not relevant to the battle for assets and, because they were recorded covertly, a french court ruled they could not be used as evidence.
Mr Joy-Morancho’s solicitor, Sofia Dionissiou- Moussaoui, admitted the device was planted but claimed it was done ‘in desperation’ to protect the welfare of his children, who were being verbally abused by their mother.
Mrs Joy ‘categorically denies’ she was abusive to her children.