Kirstie’s dad facing High Court over £320k unpaid medical bill
HIS has been a wonderful, often charmed and fascinating life during which he’s befriended everyone from Sir Mick Jagger to David Hockney.
At the same time, Lord Hindlip earned a reputation as the man with the golden gavel, achieving recordbreaking prices as an auctioneer and orchestrating the sale, for charity, of 79 of Princess Diana’s dresses which went for $3.25 million (£2.6 million) in New York, barely two months before her death.
But the New Year has dawned in grim manner for the former Christie’s chairman, 83, who, in recent years, has become better known as the father of Location, Location, Location presenter Kirstie Allsopp.
He is, I can reveal, being sued for more than £321,000 in an action destined for the High Court.
According to legal documents, this unhappy state of affairs follows ‘inpatient and outpatient services’ that the Old Etonian peer received from a private healthcare company, HCA International Ltd.
Understandably, the documents refrain from going into any detail about what kind of treatment Lord Hindlip received but allege that his contract with HCA made him ‘liable for… any charges not settled by an insurer’.
Following the treatment, the healthcare company ‘duly issued invoices’ to Hindlip’s insurer — only to be told that the invoices ‘were not covered’ by Hindlip’s policy.
At that stage, HCA claimed that the amount owed was just over £290,000. According to legal documents, requests for payment were sent to Hindlip who ‘failed or refused to pay’.
Since then, interest has been accruing at a rate of £63.64 a day — and will continue to do so ‘until [court] judgment or earlier payment’ — with the result that a further £30,739 has been added to the sum being claimed.
HCA declines to comment, while Hindlip could not be reached for comment. Last summer I disclosed that he had put his magnificent house in Dorset on the market for £6.5 million.
His wife, Fiona, who died in 2014 after a protracted battle with breast cancer, helped him create it — and left instructions that she was to be buried in its garden.