Revealed: The secret behind Britain’s most toxic divorce – he burnt her house down ‘My missus was crying her eyes out after the fire’
It was an insurance fraud that went wrong. No wonder their rift is so bitter a judge accused them of wasting their £10m fortune on endless court battles
THERE was a time when Michael Parker was so in love with his new wife Barbara that he even named his £4million ten-acre estate in Buckinghamshire after her. At first, life at ‘Babs Park’ in the idyllic village of Bourne End seemed blissfully happy for the wealthy couple, who had both been previously married and have four sons between them. Aside from sharing a state-of-the-art sevenbedroom home complete with library, swimming pool, cinema, six-car garage block and detached staff bungalow, the pair both enjoyed high-flying business careers.
Property developer Mr Parker, 54, also ran a company specialising in equipment for obesity surgery, while his 57-year-old wife had her own lucrative business supplying luxury towels and bathrobes to top hotels and spas.
But what a difference a few years and a bitter marital breakdown can make.
This week, as they strode into London’s High Court in readiness for the latest round of their costly divorce battle, the estranged pair could barely bring themselves to look at each other.
And, once inside, Michael Parker and Barbara Cooke — who has reverted to her previous husband’s surname — faced a tongue-lashing from Mr Justice Holman as he bemoaned the ‘crazy’ amounts spent by the couple, who only married in 2010, as they fight over their estimated £10 million assets.
Having already run up about £1.5million in legal bills, they are now in serious danger of frittering away their wealth.
‘If there is nothing left at the end, there is nothing left at the end,’ said the exasperated judge, pleading with the warring duo to sort out their differences and settle the matter. He added: ‘It won’t be Maseratis, will it? It will be a beaten-up old Ford if you’re lucky.’
Mr Parker and mother-of-two Mrs Cooke are fighting over BC Softwear, the towel empire that she set up in 2001.
She got the idea for the business, she says, after a friend who had been on holiday to Turkey brought her back some towels and she was impressed with their quality.
She now supplies ‘sumptuous’ towels and lightweight waffle bathrobes to customers including the Dorchester hotel in London and Chewton Glen spa in the New Forest — and made Mr Parker a director in 2006, around two years into their relationship.
So why are the once-loving couple unable to stop fighting, even if it ruins them both? The Mail can now reveal what triggered the intense bitterness at the heart of their ill-fated marriage.
Five years ago, at a previous High Court hearing, a judge found, on the balance of probabilities, that Mr Parker had arranged an arson attack on a £1 million house which belonged to Mrs Cooke as part of a failed insurance fraud.
The house was destroyed by the blaze and replaced with a new home which is now worth £2.5 million — but no criminal prosecution was brought.
At the same High Court hearing in July 2012, it was revealed that Mr Parker had also made a fraudulent claim in relation to two expensive watches he said had been stolen from his luggage. He was ordered to repay a £55,000 payout to his insurer, the National Farmers Union Mutual Insurance Society.
The Mail has learned that Mrs Cooke, who was found to have had no part in either the arson or the fraud, walked out on the marriage shortly after the judge’s ruling, moving into rented accommodation.
But severing ties with Mr Parker has not proved quite so easy.
‘The biggest mistake she ever made
‘Forget Maseratis. You’ll be driving a beaten-up Ford’
was to make Mike Parker a director of her company,’ said a source. ‘She’s kicking herself now.’
Mr Parker, however, paints a different picture: ‘It’s a family business,’ he told me. ‘The kids were involved in this from the start and spent weekends and holidays unloading containers of towels in the rain. It was set up and run by all of us for 15 years.’
Be that as it may, the days are now long gone when neighbours used to see Mrs Cooke zipping happily through the huge electric gates of the marital home on her way to and from work in her red Mercedes. Mr Parker, meanwhile, was known to circle the area in a helicopter.
The pair first met when Mrs Cooke’s sons, Oliver, 27, and Sam, 24, were at the same school as Mr Parker’s sons, Eddie, 27, and Tom, 24. Both Mrs Cooke and Mr Parker’s marriages had recently ended and they began a relationship in 2004.
Eventually, in 2007, Mrs Cooke and her sons moved out of their house in Farnham Royal, near Slough, and into Mr Parker’s vast home on a road in Bourne End, where homes are worth more than £1 million.
The property is spectacular. The bespoke kitchen has units made from American black walnut and pale sycamore, with ‘Orissa blue granite’ work surfaces. There is a temperature-controlled wine cellar.
The house has its own gym and a heated pool with an ‘Aqualift floor’ allowing the depth to be modified. The master bedroom has a private terrace and garden, and there are ‘his and her’ studies and dressing rooms, outbuildings and annexes — plus a 32-camera CCTV system to deter intruders.
But while she was living in luxury at Babs Park, Mrs Cooke’s beloved home, a large bungalow in nearby Farnham Royal, was destroyed by fire in December 2009.
Four fire crews were summoned at 1.24am after the headmaster of a neighbouring prep school raised the alarm. More than 30 firefighters battled the blaze, but were unable to save Mrs Cooke’s house.
The next morning Mr Parker posed for a photograph by the burnt wreckage, telling a local newspaper he was ‘gutted’ about the blaze.
‘It went so quickly,’ he said. ‘I was only here yesterday and it has gone today. My missus is at home crying her eyes out.’
Thames Valley Police appealed for witnesses. But while questions were raised about the fire’s origin after investigators found a key in a lock on the outside of a conservatory door, no one was ever charged with arson.
With Mr Parker denying any involvement in the fire, a few months later, in April 2010, he and Mrs Cooke
were married at High Wycombe Register Office.
But within a couple of years, as insurance investigators continued to scrutinise the fire, tensions were starting to show.
Neighbours recall hearing the couple arguing.
‘They used to shout. They were horrible to each other,’ said one.
There was friction with several neighbours and with the Chiltern Society, which complained to Wycombe District Council about the number of CCTV cameras on a 7ft fence around the couple’s property. One objector complained that Babs Park had ‘the feel of a German concentration camp’.
Then, in 2012, came the shock High Court ruling on the fire. The couple had planning permission to demolish the house and build a new one, and NFU Mutual said the fire might have been motivated by a desire to see this funded by the insurance policy.
Suspicions were aroused because of Mr Parker’s fraudulent watch claim and the fact that his name had been added to the insurance policy at Mrs Cooke’s home, even though she and Mr Parker did not live there and he had no legal interest in the property.
Then there was the matter of the key in the conservatory door. After meticulously examining the evidence, Mr Justice Teare declared: ‘I have reached the conclusion that there is no credible explanation for the fire on the evidence before the court, other than it was set by persons on the direction of Mr Parker.’
The ruling meant that neither Mr Parker nor Mrs Cooke was entitled to be indemnified by the insurance company, and Mr Parker was ordered to refund the insurer its costs in investigating the fire as well as the £55,000 paid out in 2007 for the stolen watches claim.
As the couple’s marriage disintegrated, it became clear that separating their tangled business interests would be far from straightforward because of Mrs Cooke’s decision to make Mr Parker a director of the company, which employs around 20 people. While she owns half of it, the balance of the shares is now held in person by Mr Parker, who owns just over 7 per cent, and his sons Tom and Eddie, who own just over 21 per cent each.
The Mail understands that Mrs Cooke wants to get back the shares and has offered to give up her stake in the couple’s £4 million marital home in return for them.
Mr Parker, though, told the Mail that Babs Park was not part of the divorce: ‘It’s my home and it will remain my home legally.’
A source said: ‘The only asset being fought over is BC Softwear — she [Mrs Cooke] is not after anything else. She built the business from scratch. She is very passionate about it. One of her sons has worked for the company for six years.’
While the couple have been battling over their finances for nearly three years, the latest twist came in the form of a failed unfair dismissal claim by Mr Parker’s son Eddie, who was employed by Mrs Cooke as a customer service representative.
According to a reserved judgment given at an employment tribunal in Reading in February this year, Eddie Parker’s relations with BC Softwear — and his managing director stepmother — soured after her bank told her ‘a number of refunds’ had been made from BC Softwear’s sister company, Towelsoft Ltd, to 27-year-old Eddie’s debit card.
The judgment says that Mrs Cooke ‘concluded the claimant had stolen from Towelsoft’.
After discussing the matter with the bank, she notified police about the missing money — £3,300 over a six-month period.
Eddie and Mrs Cooke had also fallen out because, although she agreed to keep his job open for four months so that he could go travelling in Australia, his father extended this ‘sabbatical leave’ to a year without Mrs Cooke’s permission.
Eddie Parker argued that the allegations were slanderous and tantamount to unfair dismissal, but the tribunal found his claim was ‘not well founded’ and dismissed it.
Unfortunately, an end to all the expensive financial bickering is still some way off. The date set for a final hearing is not until February next year.
So, for now, the meter for their legal bills is still running merrily while the couple’s shared wealth dwindles.
‘The judge is right to be frustrated. He’s saying to stop this nonsense and I’ve said that from the start,’ Mr Parker told me. ‘But we are as bad as each other.’