‘Reprehensible lawyer’ is told to pay Saudi princess £30m
A FORMER ‘magic circle’ lawyer has been ordered to pay up to £ 30million in damages to a Saudi princess after splashing her cash on a super-yacht and luxury apartment.
Ronald Gibbs, 66, was branded ‘reprehensible’ by a judge over his management of a $25million (£19.8million) investment fund for Princess Deema Bint Sultan Bin Abdulaziz Al Saud.
The former Linklaters partner used the funds to buy shares in a boat-building company he controlled, a £2.8million apartment in Montenegro and a £17million, 130ft yacht. But the princess and her brother, Prince Khalid, complained that he failed to liquidate the assets and return them to her when asked to do so in 2013 and again in 2018.
In the High Court yesterday, Mr Justice Calver said: ‘Mr Gibbs has done everything he possibly could to avoid returning these funds to the claimant and his behaviour has been reprehensible.’
He ordered Gibbs to repay the original investment pot, plus 9 per cent a year compound interest on the invested sum since 2018 – likely to be in the region of £30million. The former asset finance lawyer had complained he had been ‘ruined’ by the row and reduced to representing himself in court with nothing more than a ‘small laptop and a £50 printer’.
The court heard that Gibbs agreed to help the princess invest money given to her by her father, a former Saudi Arabia defence minister, after he quit Linklaters in 2011. The money was invested in a swish apartment at the Regent Hotel in Porto Montenegro, super-yacht company Silver Arrows Marine Ltd and a customised Sunseeker 131 yacht, named Elysium.
Simon Atrill KC, for the princess, said Gibbs signed an agreement in 2018, saying he would liquidate the investment portfolio by selling the assets, but failed to do so. After a summary judgment was entered against him for breach of that agreement in April last year, he was ordered to pay about £2million in interim damages to the princess.
He did not pay and in December, a judge ordered that a five-bedroom house Gibbs owned in Richmond-upon-Thames – valued at £4million – must be sold and the proceeds given to the princess.
As the full High Court trial began last month, the princess’s barrister said she had sued for the return of her original investment, as well as gains her financial advisers could have made with it since 2018.
Gibbs was debarred from defending the claim because of non-disclosure of evidence and failure to pay the sums ordered in interim damages. But in earlier arguments, he claimed the settlement agreement allowed him to ‘continue to manage the portfolio’ and liquidate it over time and he had ‘no liability’ to ensure the princess received her original investment.
Representing himself in court, the former high-flyer claimed he had been left financially ruined by three years of legal wrangling. He said: ‘You can’t get blood out of a stone. There is no point asking me to pay funds I don’t have. If I didn’t have an old-age pension, I would have struggled to pay the Tube fare today. My small laptop is basically all I have.’
‘You can’t get blood out of a stone’