Revealed: how financier drowned himself in Lake Geneva after mystery blaze at his stately home
STAYING in a city as synonymous with wealth as Geneva, Michael Treichl — scion of a rich and well-regarded family of bankers — usually cut a relaxed, cosmopolitan figure.
But on his latest business trip to the global financial centre in Switzerland last week, the 69-year-old hedge fund manager was wracked by turmoil so overpowering that he was driven to take his own life.
Last Friday, his body was found in Lake Geneva, and retrieved by police. It was a tragic and shocking end for Mr Treichl who had, to the outside world, lived a remarkably fortunate life. He was married to a former Vogue model, and his financial triumphs had afforded them a lifestyle of which most people can only dream.
With a historic mansion in the English countryside staffed by a butler and a chef, a private art collection, helicopter travel, and top private schools for their children, the couple enjoyed a globetrotting lifestyle and were regulars at society events.
It seemed an enviable existence — until two months ago. In the early hours of Easter Saturday, fire gutted their 500-year-old, Grade Ilisted home, Parnham House in Dorset. Such was the extent of the inferno that it took until the Wednesday of that week for the fire brigade to extinguish the flames.
On that same day, Mr Treichl was — to the shock of his family and the local community — arrested on suspicion of arson.
So began a mystery that has prompted furious debate everywhere from the sleepy pubs of Dorset to the highest echelons of the financial world. Speculation was mounting before his demise that he had money problems.
Now, his sudden death has intensified the mystery of what happened to Parnham.
Following his arrest, Mr Treichl, an Austrian citizen who had settled in Britain, was released the next day ‘under investigation’. Dorset police say this means ‘under investigation until all reasonable inquiries have been completed’.
After he was freed, he said: ‘I am devastated at the loss of our home. The restoration of Parnham has been my life’s work and it is insane to think I could have destroyed it. I am now intent on rebuilding it.’ So why did the police arrest him? The house was empty on the night of the fire, with Mr Treichl in London, and his wife Emma and their children Max, 17, and Charlotte, 15, staying with relatives in Provence in the south of France. Emma rushed home to be with her husband after he called her about the fire that morning.
‘Michael was at Parnham the following day, looking at the burning wreckage,’ she recalled. ‘He was very emotional. He could barely speak. I don’t recall his exact words — he was sobbing.’
Since then, there have been no other arrests and no public updates on the progress of the investigation, though certain clues have only served to increase speculation.
In April, the Mail revealed it was said locally that a hoard of silver antiques had been found piled outside the house. A jerrycan carrying up to 25 litres of fuel was also said to have been abandoned on the lawn.
NOW, following Mr Treichl’s death, further tantalising claims have emerged. Specialist fire warning and sprinkler systems in the house had been disabled, and a laser movement sensor burglar alarm had been turned off, it is believed.
One theory is that the fire may have been caused by sophisticated thieves anxious not only to cover their tracks, but to make it impossible to know whether treasures were lost in the blaze or stolen.
The police will not comment on such matters. Nor — yet — have they said how Mr Treichl’s death might affect their investigation.
When the news broke on Monday, his devastated family released a statement saying he had ‘sadly passed away, having suffered from severe depression’. It added: ‘Michael enjoyed a long and distinguished career in finance. He was a devoted family man and husband to his wife Emma, their two children, and his two step-children.’
Now, investigators in Switzerland are attempting to piece together the financier’s final hours. Officers would not say who alerted them to Mr Treichl’s body in the lake, but a family friend confirmed to me that he was in Switzerland on business alone. The family has been living elsewhere in Dorset since the fire.
ASPOkESMAN for Geneva police said: ‘The most probable cause of death is suicide by drowning. The police were alerted by someone and a body was found in Lake Geneva by our lake brigade.
‘It is too early to discuss toxicology, and the attorney general requested an autopsy. Nothing more can be said at this stage as the police investigation is open.’
Exactly what drove Mr Treichl into the waters of Lake Geneva remains to be seen. But there seems little doubt the fire at Parnham deeply affected him.
He bought the house for a reputed £4 million in 2001, and spent as much as £10million doing it up. It was just the latest remodelling in its history, the most notable being when Regency architect John Nash reshaped Parnham in the Gothic style around 1810.
Despite 100 firefighters tackling the blaze — after being alerted by a milkman at 3.50am — only the exterior walls were saved.
Mr Treichl’s collection of hunting trophies and portraits were all destroyed, as was a collection of medieval armour amassed by one of his relatives, which included a suit of armour that survived the Turkish occupation of Vienna in 1529.
Yesterday, a friend told me: ‘He had suffered from depression since before the fire. The fire exacerbated [it]. When your home is your life’s work and all your possessions are destroyed, as theirs were, it would be deeply depressing for someone who wasn’t already diagnosed with the condition, let alone one who was.’
Mr Treichl, once described in a German magazine as ‘slim, quiet, restrained, with surprisingly expressive eyes’, was a leading light in London-based hedge fund, Audley Capital Advisers LLP.
Friends insist ‘Audley was and is a leading hedge fund’. But — perhaps inevitable when a financier takes his own life — questions have been raised about whether Mr Treichl’s finances were as rosy as appearances suggested.
One Austrian analyst claimed: ‘There is a suggestion the assets under management [at Audley] were reducing, that things were going downhill for a while. If that is true, the profitability of the whole thing is going to go down steadily.’
Mr Treichl himself acknowledged
in an interview last August, after the UK’s referendum on EU membership, that his ventures faced ups and downs. ‘We are hardly affected by Brexit, but we have to adjust to the weak pound.’
Yesterday, a spokesman for Audley Capital Advisers said coowners Julian Treger and Michael Treichl ‘were hugely successful a few years ago’.
‘In recent years, they have worked less together. Julian has been focusing on the mining industry within Audley, which has been successful, and Michael has been pursuing other successful interests,’ he said.
Mr Treichl’s other activities included several private equity interests which had given significant returns in recent years.
Asked about Audley making a loss of £811,528 in 2015, but in 2016 a profit of £273,961, the spokesman said it can take years for investments to realise profits and for this to be reflected in accounts.
Mr Treichl held an MBA from Harvard Business School, spent almost 20 years in banking, and held senior positions at investment banks SG Warburg in London and Merrill Lynch in New York. In that time he developed a certain pragmatism. ‘Of course, there are always investments which do not run as you have imagined,’ he once said, but added that with a couple of exceptions, he was ‘quite satisfied’ with the progress of his career.
‘Money is not an end goal, but you can make a beautiful life with it,’ he said. ‘As a professional investor I only earn money when my investors make profits with me.’
In Switzerland this week, officials said that an autopsy is general practice for deaths which occur in a public place, including lakes.
‘Now that the autopsy has been completed, the body has been handed over to the family,’ a spokesman for the Public Prosecutor’s Office said on Thursday.
Amid the shock of the suspected suicide, some observers pointed out this week — in what may be no more than a grim coincidence — that he died on the 65th birthday of his brother Andreas, chief executive of Austria’s largest bank Erste Group. (Their father Heinrich Treichl, also a respected banker, died aged 101 in 2014.)
A report in business magazine Trend once called the relationship between Michael and Andreas ‘chilly’ — a claim which arose because a company which was, it said, ‘a subsidiary of the Erste Bank of Andreas Treichl’ was involved in a financial disagreement in which Michael played a part.
The report is disputed by Andreas, but the differences are said to go back nearly a decade to a power struggle for control of an Austrian firm called Meinl International Power (MIP). Michael Treichl had been on the company board and helped to raise money from investors. But at an extraordinary general meeting in 2008, he was removed as a director.
Later he said: ‘The investment of these funds was somewhat sluggish . . . I was cast from the supervisory board,’ phlegmatically adding: ‘Too bad, that is capitalism.’
His ejection from the board was the result of a corporate battle in which he was set against what the Austrian press called a ‘rebel side’. This group included an investment firm called ESPA, connected to the bank run by Michael Treichl’s brother Andreas.
Did those circumstances really lead to bad blood?
Andreas Treichl’s spokesman told me he would not comment on Michael’s death. He added: ‘The report of Trend was badly investigated. ESPA was working in this case on behalf of its clients and not Erste Bank. But this didn’t fit into the [magazine’s] story . . .’
As the sun blazed down on a sparkling Lake Geneva yesterday, investigators in two countries were seeking answers to the ever-more pressing questions of why this brilliant man took his own life — and why his Dorset mansion was reduced to ashes.