Lawyer’s £1m property fight with her dad, 75, and his wife, 33 (who used to be her au pair)
WHEN Audra Wamsteker’s mother died, she invited her father to move in with her.
But the millionaire City solicitor was horrified when her lawyer father Paul David started sleeping with her 28-year-old Filipino au pair, and says he also threatened her husband with an axe.
Father and daughter are now living apart again – and embroiled in a bitter court battle over Mrs Wamsteker’s assets.
The pair had always been close in their personal and financial lives, Central London County Court heard, and shared a mutually ‘loving and generous’ relationship as the family built up a portfolio of properties across London, the US and Malaysia.
But Mr David, 75 – who has married au pair Jobeth Daguio and had two children with her – claims Mrs Wamsteker, 49, owes him more than £1 million, including jewellery that belonged to her mother.
Barrister Desmond Kilcoyne, representing Mrs Wamsteker, told Judge Simon Monty QC that the pair’s dislike of each other’s partners had ‘resulted in the wholesale breakdown of the close relationship between them’.
He said: ‘The existing litigation is now motivated by a high degree of animosity by Mr David towards his daughter and particularly her husband.’
Mr David says he can’t stand his ‘greedy’ son- in- law, but denies wielding an axe at him.
Mr David, who is representing himself and is backed by his son, Alvin, also a lawyer, claimed his daughter, who lives in Canary Wharf, central London, had gone back on her word to take care of him.
‘She told me, “Mummy made me swear that I’d look after you to your dying day”,’ he said.
Mr David moved in with his daughter – who has practised law in London for 17 years and previously worked for accounting giants Ernst and Young – after he was widowed in 2008.
He subsequently began an affair with her live-in nanny Miss Daguio, now 33 – someor thing Mrs Wamsteker described as ‘unthinkably repugnant’.
The breakdown in the relationship led to Mr David being ‘excluded’ from his daughter’s home, he claims.
Part of his claim is for £150,000 to cover rent he has paid since 2013, the year he married Miss Daguio. He currently lives in Stratford, also laid claim East London. to a four-bedroom He has detached bungalow in Worcester Park, Surrey, valued at £740,000, and a flat in West Ham, East London, worth £275,000.
Mr David claims he is the ‘beneficial owner’ of both properties, even though they are in his daughter’s name, as he paid the deposits for them and ‘funded’ the made mortgages. ‘contributions’ towards He also wants the proceeds from four properties in Florida which his daughter sold in 2014, and is demanding the return of 23 items of jewellery that belonged to his late wife, saying they were given to his daughter for ‘safekeeping’. Mr Kilcoyne told the court his client denies her father ever owned any of the properties. She is also refusing to hand over the jewellery, saying they were a ‘gift’ from her father before their relationship broke down. The barrister told the court that Mrs Wamsteker used to think of her father ‘like a god’, but there was a darker side to their relationship. ‘She says he used to badger her for money,’ he said. Mr David replied: ‘She makes me look like some kind of gangster. I look like a horrible man standing here. I still love both my children.’ He also denied an allegation that he threatened to ‘destroy’ his daughter and kill her husband, 52-year- old investment director Adrianus Wamsteker, with an axe. ‘No. The axe was in my bedroom him with drawer. an If axe I had like approached he says, I would have hurt him,’ he said. ‘That’s true, I dislike him. I don’t deny it. I realised what he was when he married my daughter in 2004. She’s got a very greedy husband.’ The case continues.