Fraud of the manor?
Baroness sues her lawyer after ‘being tricked into signing over £2m fortune’
AN ARISTOCRAT is suing her former lawyer after claiming she was tricked into signing over her £2 million fortune.
Baroness Jacqueline van Zuylen was allegedly persuaded by Rodney Whiston-Dew to invest her money in a tax- efficient trust in the Seychelles in 2012.
The ‘financially unsophisticated’ baroness had never worked a day in her life and claims she was easily taken in by the ‘impressive’ solicitor, who was a director of the trust.
But the High Court in London heard that when she asked for the money back five years later after losing faith in him, he did not return it. She is now suing him for £4 million.
Whiston-Dew, 70, who was jailed for ten years and struck off after being convicted over a £65 million investment scam in 2017, denies the baroness’s allegations. He claims he had been trying to protect her money and ‘ rein in her extraordinary’ £200,000-a-year spending habit.
Managing her affairs was ‘ extremely time- consuming’ while she jetted around the world on horse-riding expeditions and interior design projects, he said.
Baroness van Zuylen, a divorced mother of one, was living on income generated from her savings when she was introduced to Whiston-Dew in 2011.
The money was held in shares, bonds and cash but ‘ had not been performing well’, her lawyer Imran Benson said. The keen horsewoman, who lives in the Cotswolds village of Little Faringdon, was ‘ financially unsophisticated’, he added.
The ‘persuasive’ Whiston-Dew offered to invest her money so she would have ‘ a monthly income for life’. Court documents at a pre-trial hearing claim that in 2012, the baroness transferred £2,103,619 to a Seychelles-based company of which Whiston-Dew was the director.
He told her the money had been put in a tax-efficient trust called the Azure Trust and invested in gold and property, Mr Benson said. But when asked to explain what was going on with the money, Whiston-Dew ‘would regularly say it was better for tax reasons to have no paperwork’.
The baroness, who divorced her husband, Baron Thierry van Zuylen before his death in 2011, was paid £846,076 income over the following years, Mr Benson said. But after losing faith in the arrangement in 2017, she asked for her money back and an explanation of what had happened to it.
The lawyer said: ‘The capital sum has not been returned.’
The administrator of the trust ‘has since said that the Azure Trust had never held any monies’, he added.
The baroness is claiming her money back, plus compensation for lost investment gains.
In 2017, Whiston-Dew was jailed for conspiracy to cheat the public revenue and acting with intent to prejudice or defraud HM Revenue & Customs.
He was among a group of five Eton and Oxbridge- educated businessmen who conned wealthy individuals into investing millions of pounds into a fake ‘green’ investment scheme. Writing from prison, WhistonDew said the baroness had lost money on poor investments and was overspending on credit cards and overdrafts when they met. The trust, which he said was set up on the Caribbean island of Nevis, had been arranged to preserve what was left of her money.
Whiston-Dew said: ‘ The baroness was very frequently travelling abroad... leaving me to deal with ever-increasing calls from her bank. These became daily occurrences.’
He also argued that UK courts had no jurisdiction to deal with a case concerning funds held on the island of Nevis.
A full trial is set to go ahead later this year.
‘Financially unsophisticated’