GET OUT OF MY CASTLE!
Millionaire faces eviction from Henry VIII estate after money laundering claim
‘Taking helicopter lessons’
A millionAire businessman is facing eviction from a castle on a country estate where Henry Viii once hunted after allegations that he has used it to launder cash.
Simon Giles, 41, lives in the south wing of the Grade ii-listed lullingstone Castle at eynsford in Kent.
The estate, which was also visited by Queen Anne, has a vineyard, 19-acre lake, formal gardens, Tudor gatehouse and chapel. mr Giles, a father of three, parks his rolls-royce Silver Shadow on the estate and has used the castle grounds to land while taking helicopter lessons.
But he is now embroiled in a High Court legal battle with HSBC, which was instructed to stop accepting mortgage payments on the property after concerns were raised over their source. The bank is trying to repossess the property.
Documents submitted to the court by another defendant suggest mr Giles has used aliases and multiple companies across the globe to move his funds around while being subject to court judgments freezing his business accounts over money laundering allegations and after being branded ‘untrustworthy’ for his role in a ‘misleading’ pension scheme.
The court had been shown evidence suggesting that some of the money used to pay the £5,665 monthly mortgage on his home in the castle has come from companies behind rogue pension schemes – a claim he emphatically denies.
The documents were submitted to the court by Kathryn Durnford, who is listed alongside mr Giles’s company as a defendant in the case with HSBC because she still holds the title deed and mortgage on the property. She said that after she put the property on the market in August 2010 mr Giles approached her via an estate agent using the name ‘Simon murray’, and made an offer of almost £1.4million.
He explained that he wanted to buy it under an ‘option to purchase agreement’ through his Seychelles registered companySlF Associates inc.SlFw as to make monthly mortgage payments and then had the option to buy the property outright by a certain date.
But mrs Durnford said that in 2012 she realised the mortgage payments appeared to be coming from accounts in Belize, Berlin, Zurich and the isle of man. ‘my accountant expressed concern and suggested i should investigate further the source of funds, as i could be implicated in money laundering,’ she said in a witness statement.
mrs Durnford discovered a 2014 Supreme Court of Seychelles order freezing the accounts of SlF Associates under anti- money laundering legislation.
She said she explained the situation to HSBC and instructed the bank to stop all transactions coming into her mortgage.
With no payments being made on her behalf, she fell into arrears and the bank launched a repossession claim in november 2018.
HSBC was granted a possession order at Dartford County Court but SlF won a stay, which the bank will try to overturn at the High Court next month. SlF and mrs Durnford are in dispute over the option to purchase agreement. SlF says she has no right to stop its mortgage payments.
mr Giles said that for a period he used his mother’s maiden name, murray, but he had never hidden his birth name and mrs Durnford was always aware of this.
He added that no mortgage payments have ever been made by any pension schemes or pension assets and said he was the victim of ‘unfounded and inaccurate’ allegations. He claimed mrs Durnford withdrew her consent for HSBC to accept mortgage payments in late 2018 to try to bring about a repossession.