NOT A GREAT ADVERT FOR MARRIAGE!
He paid his first wife a record £29m divorce settlement. Now Britain’s richest ad man Sir Martin Sorrell faces shelling out OVER £100m to wife No 2 . . . after lurid claims he visited a Mayfair brothel
MONDAY night at the Chelsea Flower Show is the most sought-after invitation of the summer season. On that May evening, the broad avenues around the Royal Hospital thrum with every mover and shaker in town — tycoons, hot-shot lawyers and financial wizards — all there to see and be seen.
It is also, uniquely, the one social engagement where, in the male-dominated business world, husbands brings their wives rather than their mistresses. So diminutive advertising mogul Sir Martin Sorrell’s solo appearance at last year’s gala event was bound to stand out. He was there without Cristiana, his glamorous — and taller — second wife whose ‘significant contribution’ to his working life he has never grown weary of publicly acknowledging. But her absence provoked questions about whether it was the first significant crack in the highly polished image the couple had continued to present ever since Sir Martin, now 75, was mired in lurid claims in 2018 that he put a £300 visit to a Mayfair brothel on company expenses.
In interviews that followed his shock departure from WPP that same year, the firm he had built into the world’s biggest advertising conglomerate, he brushed aside talk of marital difficulties, dismissed reports he used company cash to pay for a prostitute, and instead paid tribute to his Italian-born wife for standing by him.
Her decision late on Tuesday night to release a statement which said that she and her husband of 12 years had separated, and that she was seeking a divorce, makes clear that support is now at an end.
‘My husband and I have separated and I am seeking a divorce to end our marriage,’ Lady Sorrell said. ‘From here on, my priority will be e the interests of my daughter, and I request that the media respect my and my family’s privacy.’
According to a friend, she had been ‘broken’ by the sordid allegations and could no longer trust Sorrell.
Seemingly the only mystery was why it had taken so long for her to make her move.
Fifteen years ago, Sir Martin paid a then record divorce settlement of more than £29 million to his first wife, Sandra Finestone, after 33 years of marriage. But that sum is likely to be dwarfed by the payout he can expect to make to wife number two.
Although stunningly rich — in 2018 WPP shareholders rebuked Sorrell’s ‘obscene’ £48 million pay packet — his personal fortune is said to have risen from £148 million to a near £368 million in the years since he and Cristiana, with whom he has a threeyear-old daughter, married in 2008.
Divorce lawyers suggest that Lady Sorrell’s ‘starting point’ should be a claim for half of the £220 million increase made over the course of the marriage. A £110 million settlement would comfortably make it one of the top five biggest divorce settlements in British legal history.
It will certainly be messy. The couple have a jet- set lifestyle with a £12 million home in Belgravia, an apartment in central Manhattan close to the Empire State Building, and a luxury holiday home in Uruguay, where they like to spend Christmas.
Cristiana has hired one of London’s leading divorce lawyers, Davina Katz, to negotiate the settlement.
The solicitor, who represented actress Kate Winslet in her divorce from James Bond director Sam Mendes, charges a reported £575 an hour and specialises in high-value divorces. It is not known if there is a pre-nuptial agreement.
Sorrell is likely to want to avoid a public courtroom battle. After all, he knows just how brutal divorce can be. First wife Sandra, with whom he has three sons, received £23.5 million in cash, assets including a £3.25 million four-storey Georgian townhouse in Knightsbridge, and two spaces in the Harrods underground car park, then worth around £90,000 each. But equally damaging were the submissions in court in which Sorrell was described as a ‘father by appointment’. Sandra described how he had ‘marginalised’ and ‘dehumanised’ her, ‘discarded her from his affections and took a mistress’.
Chastening enough, you might think, to put anyone off marriage for good. But within three years of jettisoning American- born Sandra,
Sorrell was saying his marriage vows all over again. He and Cristiana Falcone met at Davos, the exclusive Swiss ski resort where she worked as a media adviser for the World Economic Forum, and pretty soon she was wearing a huge diamond ring.
Although almost 30 years his junior, and with a glossy mane of blonde hair and tanned limbs, the steely Cristiana was always more than just a trophy wife.
‘Don’t get me wrong, she likes the red-carpet life and being addressed as Lady Sorrell,’ says one old friend of the couple. ‘ Tickets for the Olympics, the World Cup and that sort of thing. But she’s also been a player in media, business and social development sectors.’
Lady Sorrell is currently on the board of directors at media conglomerate Viacom and, perhaps awkwardly under the circumstances, is chief executive of her husband’s family charity, the JMCMRJ Sorrell Foundation.
For many years no high-profile London gathering was complete without their presence.
And the pugnacious Sir Martin could rarely resist the chance to burnish his credentials as the world’s most famous ad-man.
He became a favourite of the BBC and a regular on Question Time, Today and Newsnight, especially during the interminable Brexit debate when he was among the most prominent of Remainers. With the sharp-tongued Cristiana on his arm
Cristiana’s hired Kate Winslet’s divorce lawyer ‘She was broken by all the claims about prostitutes’
— she is, say friends, unafraid to venture her own opinions — the Sorrells were a formidable double act. But that was then.
His abrupt and unexpected resignation in April 2018 from WPP, an obscure wire and plastic shopping basket company before he took it over 35 years ago, prompted intense speculation in the City and was surrounded in secrecy.
Then, the Wall Street Journal claimed he had been spotted in June 2017 by two WPP employees going into a dimly lit brothel in the red light district of Shepherd Market, prompting an internal investigation by the company.
The prostitutes advertising their services at the one-bedroom address were described as ‘young models’ in their 20s. Bondage equipment was reported to have been hanging from the bedroom door.
There were also newspaper reports of bullying of staff by Sorrell and the sacking of a company chauffeur.
He has strenuously denied all the allegations, but the repercussions have dominated his life ever since.
While typically rebuilding his business reputation with his new advertising company S4 Capital — he has been splurging cash on acquisitions and the firm is claimed to be on track to double in size by 2021 — his attempts at saving his marriage seem to have proved less successful.
The friend, who has known Sir Martin and Lady Sorrell for several years, tells me: ‘The only real surprise is the timing — why now? Cristiana has been fed up for ages and they have been leading separate lives. The fact is she was broken by all the prostitute claims.
‘Despite everything, it absolutely shook her belief in him and it became a question of trust, or rather a lack of it.’
City insiders believe the timing of the announcement of the separation may actually turn out to have been a shrewd business move. ‘It has allowed Sorrell’s new company to grow without any distraction,’ says one figure.
Intriguingly, as recently as last February, Lady Sorrell paid a heartfelt tribute to her embattled husband. In new accounts for the Sorrell Foundation she said: ‘I personally would like to thank, once again, the chairman [Sir Martin] and our family for their commitment, trust, time and counselling including our next generation who inspire us to go further.’ At the time, it was reported that Lady Sorrell’s words of support would help dispel rumours of marital trouble. Little wonder, then, that Sorrell must have thought all his troubles were behind him. After all, he has fought himself out of tight spots before, notably following his audacious move to buy the Ogilvy & Mather agency in 1989. Following on the heels of his hostile swoop on the world’s oldest ad group, JWT, this made Sorrell a global force in advertising. The arrival of a bean counter into the world of Mad Men was not well received. The takeover prompted David Ogilvy — regarded as the father of modern advertising — to label Sorrell an ‘odious little s***’ who had ‘never written an advertisement in his life’. But WPP grew relentlessly, gobbling up rivals and lining the pockets of investors along the way. It has 134,000 employees in more than 100 countries. At the same time, Sorrell benefited from hugely controversial reward schemes netting him hundreds of millions
‘Sorrell loved the glamour, the deals, the sex’
in pay deals. His £70.4 million pay packet in 2015 was one of the biggest in British corporate history. Yet Sir Martin, who was educated at fee-paying Haberdashers’ Aske’s School in North London, and at Cambridge, where he was friends with TV historian Simon Schama and former Tate Gallery boss Sir Nicholas Serota, has always been a remarkably touchy figure.
He was once described as driven by a ‘classic Napoleon complex’, as much for his intense ambition as his diminutive stature.
The son of an electronics retailer, he began his corporate climb at Saatchi and Saatchi in the 1970s. ‘This was still the Mad Men era and he wanted to be part of it,’ recalls a friend from early in his career.
‘He loved it all, the glamour, the deals, the sex and that transactional attitude became part of his private life too.’
Famously, the perma-tanned Sorrell — who was knighted in 2000 for services to the communications industry — spotted the digital media explosion and the change in advertising patterns long before many rivals.
The question last night was whether he saw the writing on the wall for his marriage.
Last night, a friend of Sir Martin said the tycoon considered it a ‘private matter’.