Tycoon’s ex cooks on camping stove in spare room – as he lives upstairs in £20m mansion with young lover!
‘Another nail in his coffin’
AS the wife of a flamboyant property mogul, she was the lady of his £20million mansion, enjoying its many luxuries, including a ballroom, swimming pool and roof terrace.
But having separated although not divorced from Robert Tchenguiz, Heather Bird, 48, now lives in a small, dark bedroom on the first floor, where she cooks on a camping stove and tries to avoid the 57-year- old and his Polish model girlfriend Julia Dybowska, 27, who live on the fourth floor.
‘It’s okay – I guess that’s what my options are right now,’ American Miss Bird, who grew up in a Mormon family in Utah, said as she gave a television crew a glimpse of her bedroom, which is connected to a room for her two children from the marriage.
‘It’s not my choice. I didn’t select the room.
‘I usually eat in my room or eat here with the kids sometimes. I cook my food in my room. I have my little fridge, kettle and little stove burners.
‘We do our best to have some good energy here and create our little home.’
Her unusual living arrangements in the house overlooking the Royal Albert Hall in Kensington, west London, were revealed in a BBC2 documentary, Robbie’s War: The Rise and Fall of a Playboy Billionaire.
Mr Tchenguiz and his brother Vincent, who are Iranian-born and American-educated, came to prominence in the 1980s as two of the West End’s biggest landlords.
Their property and business deals gave them, at their peak, a portfolio of more than 600 buildings said to have been worth £4.5 billion.
But they lost vast sums in the credit crunch, with Robert losing £1.6 billion in the Icelandic banking crisis.
He was then wrongly arrested for fraud after the 2008 financial crash, and the Serious Fraud Office has since paid him £1.5 million in damages.
There has been litigation over his business affairs and he could lose the house, which according to his lawyers, is ‘effectively frozen’ until the legal battles are finished.
Miss Bird met Mr Tchenguiz in St Tropez when he was already a billionaire. They married in 2005, but separated in 2010, when he still had about 20 per cent of his fortune.
She said in the documentary: ‘Robbie initially asked me not to divorce him and not to go for a settlement. So I knew he was going through a really hard time. I didn’t want to be another nail in his coffin and make life harder for him.
‘We did both consult lawyers and the lawyers assured me that they could get £10 million for me as a settlement. And now if I were to divorce him I would get absolutely zero.’
Miss Bird, who runs a beauty clinic, lived in an apartment in Battersea, south-west London, for six years but said she moved back into the house ‘ because Robert needed to mortgage the apartment’. She says she would love to move into an apartment of her own again. One problem she has encountered in his house is that her clothes, including bras, sometimes get mixed up with Miss Dybowska’s.
Mr Tchenguiz has accused the former trustees of his empire of gross negligence and has been embroiled in litigation against them.
He thought Investec Trust Guernsey had kept his personal assets separate from his business ventures, but he was wrong, meaning the receivers were able to access his home, along with everything else.
The documentary followed Mr Tchenguiz during his latest – and unsuccessful – court case against Investec Trust Guernsey, which vehemently denies his allegations of gross negligence and had twice already been cleared in court.
Following his latest defeat, Mr Tchenguiz said he planned to fight on and his next appeal will be to the European Court of Human Rights.