The ultimate price?
Five high-rolling friends, a business deal known as Project Moscow, and how all of them died in horrific circumstances – supposedly at their own hands. Now the spy scandal has raised disturbing new questions about the Cipriani Five’s fate by Gavin Madeley
FOR years, the group of wealthy businessmen would meet at their regular haunt in a discreet Mayfair restaurant united by a love of delicious food, fine wines – and money. Known as the Cipriani Five after the venue for their exclusive dining club, they shared an uncanny knack for unlocking multi-millionpound investment deals in Russia and the former Soviet Bloc.
Among the close friends savouring the fruits of their luxury lifestyle was Scot Young, a self-made millionaire who rose from a Dundee council scheme to become one of Britain’s richest men.
Around the table would sit the controversial Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky, former musician turned investor Johnny Elichaoff and fellow property speculators Paul Castle and Robert Curtis.
There is, of course, one more thing which unites this tight circle of business associates – within the space of a few years the Cipriani Five would all be dead. All killed in disturbing circumstances and all, according to police, by their own hands.
Two threw themselves under Tube trains, one launched himself from the roof of a shopping centre, while Berezovsky – a former mentor of Russian President Vladimir Putin – hanged himself from bath taps in the sauna at his country mansion.
Arguably the most perplexing case of all, though, is that of Mr Young. The body of the property and telecoms tycoon was found impaled on railings four floors below his penthouse flat in an elegant central London square one cold December night in 2014.
It was an agonising end for a man whose colourful, but intensely secretive, life could comfortably feature as a character from the BBC television series McMafia.
A playboy with a penchant for parties and cocaine, he claimed to be penniless at the time of his death despite being embroiled in a longrunning legal battle with his ex-wife, Michelle, over a £400million fortune she remains convinced he salted away beyond her reach into a string of offshore tax havens.
Police say he jumped, citing money worries and reports of mental ill health. Yet, despite the animosity between them, Mrs Young remains one of many who are adamant that her former husband was pushed.
Now, amid the deepening diplomatic crisis triggered by the nerve gas assassination attempt on Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Julia, officials are said to be scrutinising the deaths of Mr Young and Berezovsky and up to 12 others with fresh urgency.
Counter-terrorism police have also opened a separate investigation into the ‘unexplained’ death of Berezovsky’s former right-hand man and another arch-enemy of Putin on British soil.
Nikolai Glushkov, 68, was found dead at his London home on Monday. A Russian media source said Glushkov, the former boss of the state airline Aeroflot, who said he feared he was on a Kremlin hit list, was found with ‘strangulation marks’ on his neck.
TANTALISINGLY, Mrs Young’s dogged efforts to lay her hands on what she regards as her rightful share of her late husband’s fortune may have thrown up posthumous clues about the likely involvement of dark forces on that top-floor balcony nearly four years ago.
In a recent interview, she said: ‘Of course Scot didn’t kill himself. For one thing, he wouldn’t go near a high window. He was afraid of heights – it was a phobia.’
A friend who knew Mr Young for over 20 years said he had already been threatened by gangsters two years previously when he was hung out of a window at the Dorchester Hotel in London.
And Mrs Young maintains that her husband was murdered precisely because he started telling the people he had used to hide his money that he wanted it back.
What seems indisputable is that along with his Cipriani cronies, Scot Young had earned a reputation as a highly successful ‘fixer’ of major property deals with Russian moneymen. US intelligence files put it more bluntly, suggesting that he was mixing with some very dangerous people.
Mr Young, who was 52 when he died, was suspected of moneylaundering and made numerous trips to Russia on behalf of Berezovsky. His business dealings – the details of which he went to prison to protect rather than disclose to a divorce court – were complex.
He was known to have contact with Russian underworld figures, many of whom act in tandem with Russian intelligence, and his activities led him to be placed under surveillance by Russian spies.
Yet there was no indication of the lifestyle to come while he was growing up.
The son of a Dundee United footballer, young Scot was raised in a tenement block and left school at 16 with few qualifications.
He moved into property development during the boom of the mid1980s but his lucky break was meeting Michelle Orwell, daughter of a successful businessman, in 1988. He was 26. She found Mr Young ‘charismatic and assertive’, adding: ‘He told me within two days of meeting me that he wanted us to marry and have children.’
Mr Young, an only child, soon moved into the family’s ten-acre farm near Brentwood, Essex, where Michelle, a fashion buyer, bred miniature horses. Her father took to Mr Young and he and Michelle invested in his business.
‘My family are warm and embracing,’ she said. ‘They knew I was in love and they liked Scot, so we all got on well.’
In 1991 the couple moved into their first home, a Tudor-style house with a swimming pool nearby, and daughter Scarlet, now 25, was born the following year.
Her sister Sasha, now 23, came along two years later and in 1995 the Youngs were married at Chelsea Register Office.
Mrs Young said they were happy days though both were ‘fiery and stubborn’. Behind her back, her husband was already making unsavoury friends among the London underworld and two of his associates were laundering money for a crime syndicate.
At one point, Mr Young was arrested on suspicion of drugs trafficking, but escaped conviction.
Whatever the source of his money, it was pouring in and giving his wife and daughters a lifestyle of which most people could only dream.
The couple moved into ninebedroom Woodperry House, a Palladian villa in Oxfordshire, with servants. They also owned Bakeham House, on the exclusive Wentworth Estate, in Surrey, and a bolthole in the Cotswolds.
After Berezovsky was granted asylum in the UK in 2003, Mr Young’s attentions seemed to turn East. As improbable as it sounds, the pair became friends after the Russian turned up unannounced one day offering to buy the Youngs’ Wentworth mansion. Berezovsky arrived at the head of a phalanx of
oligarchs and businessmen who flooded here on a tidal wave of unimaginable riches, greedily acquiring the trappings of London society – a townhouse in Belgrave Square or Eaton Terrace, a public school education for their children and endless shopping on the King’s Road.
It must have been almost impossible for a man of Young’s modest upbringing to avoid being dazzled by such displays of financial muscle and his friendship with Berezovsky and others yielded ever greater rewards for a doting Mr Young to shower on his family.
The girls attended private school while presents for his wife included a Range Rover filled with clothes by designer Maria Grachvogel and, for her 40th birthday, a million pounds’ worth of jewellery from Graff. She boasted that her wedding ring alone cost £1million.
Mr Young, once described as a billionaire, invested in telecoms and chip-and-pin technology and started moving in elevated circles, counting Topshop boss Sir Philip Green and music mogul Simon Cowell among his friends.
But how much of the fortune he lavished on palatial houses, superyachts and private jets was actually his own?
He was always very reticent about his business interests. With good cause, as his wife would soon discover to her cost.
In 2005, the family moved to an opulent beachfront property in Miami after a tense time in the marriage and Mrs Young began searching for a permanent home for the family. Then, everything began to fall apart.
IN 2006, Mr Young walked out on their 11-year marriage. As the couple headed for the divorce courts, he declared that the collapse of a big Russian deal had left him penniless.
Mrs Young refused to accept this, convinced he was worth ‘a few billion pounds at least’.
The courts heard she hired eight private detectives to track Mr Young’s movements, working in shifts. He, in turn, repeatedly lied about his true wealth, funnelling it into offshore accounts.
He even accepted a six-month jail term for ‘flagrant and deliberate’ contempt of court rather than give up the money. Some of his wealth turned out to be faked. The £1million diamond set he gave his wife for her 40th birthday turned out to be worth £150,000.
In 2013, after 65 hearings and millions frittered away in legal fees, Mrs Young was awarded £20million, plus £6.6million legal costs, although she has never seen a penny of it.
The judge complained that ‘extremely serious allegations have been bandied around like confetti’, pointing out that there was no evidence Mr Young lost any money on his Russian deal.
That ‘deal’, known as Project Moscow, was dismissed by one Russian dissident as a scam, cooked up around the table at the Cipriani by members of what he nicknamed the Suicide Club.
Construction businessman Valery Morozov said the deal was a front to launder money for the mafia and their now-dead associates in Britain and involved the purchase of a non-existent office block at a former paint factory.
He said the Cipriani Five paid in for one reason only: ‘The money must disappear and the project must collapse. In other words, the money must turn up somewhere where nobody would find it, and this money must be in a place nobody would know about. Sometimes, even those who pay, know nothing.’
ONCE invested, Mr Young lost control of it after being out-manoeuvred by Russian mafia gangs linked to the secret services, Mr Morozov believes. He suggested all five of the Suicide Club members were stung after millions of pounds was siphoned from their accounts into offshore companies beyond their control.
‘The members of this Suicide Club had been hiding their money in offshore structures via Russia and Russian business projects. This is the only sensible explanation. Every member of this club stopped living when they officially had no money,’ he added, ominously.
The first to die was Paul Castle, who like Mr Young left school with few exam passes but went on to play polo alongside Prince Charles and shake hands with the Queen. A dashing character and bon viveur, Castle, 61, surrounded himself with beautiful women and shady business partners.
He threw himself under a Tube at Bond Street in 2010, with one associate saying that he ‘owed a lot of money to the wrong people’.
Property tycoon Robbie Curtis lived a fast lifestyle and once dated the model Caprice.
Yet in 2012, he too apparently threw himself under a Tube train in North London, at the age of just 47. He was said to have suffered in the recession and had bad debts.
Next to go was Berezovsky, 67, who fell out spectacularly with Mr Putin and was granted asylum by Tony Blair in 2003.
The oligarch, who was convinced his Kremlin enemies would track him down and kill him, was found dead at his Berkshire mansion in 2013. Again, it looked like suicide, but a pathologist retained by Berezovsky’s daughter, Elizaveta, suggested the ligature marks were consisted with murder.
In November 2014, a month before Mr Young’s death, Elichaoff – the 55-year-old former husband of TV presenter Trinny Woodall – was found dead at the foot of Whiteleys shopping centre in West London, again amid talk of money troubles and depression.
Two weeks before his death, Elichaoff had been sectioned under the Mental Health Act after being talked down from the same spot. A coroner ruled his death was suicide.
After he was released from his jail term for contempt, Mr Young continued to splurge around £60,000 a week despite sticking to his claim he was penniless.
He dated Noelle Reno, an American-born model and star of the reality TV show Ladies of London. They dined often at the Ivy and Cipriani and attended parties at Boujis, his favourite club. He binged on drink and drugs, behaving more and more erratically.
Miss Reno told an inquest in July 2015 that on the night he died, Mr Young had arrived at their Montagu Square flat ‘the most
sober since he got out of prison’ but ‘more desperate than I had ever seen him’.
They had a row and she left. By the time she returned, he was dead. Rumour immediately declared Mr Young to be the latest victim of a rogue Russian state with little regard for the rule of international law. The Cipriani Five were just names on a lengthening list of those who appeared to have fallen foul of Mr Putin’s kleptocracy.
Most famously, former KGB officer Alexander Litvinenko drank tea poisoned with polonium-210 – a deadly radioactive element – after fleeing to Britain with evidence that gangsters were plotting the murder of Berezovsky.
Litvinenko, 43, fell ill after meeting a KGB officer and his associate at the Millennium Hotel in London’s Grosvenor Square in 2006. The polonium210 was traced to a Russian nuclear plant.
Businessman Alexander Perepilichny, 44, who had also fallen foul of the Kremlin, died while out jogging near his Surrey home in 2012. An inquest heard his stomach contained a substance known as ‘heartbreak grass’, or gelsemium, a poison which causes paralysis of the spinal cord, physical collapse and death by asphyxiation.
The body of Gareth Williams, 32 – a former computer systems expert at GCHQ on secondment to MI6 in London – was discovered inside a sports bag, with padlocks on the outside, at his flat in central London in August 2010.
US spies suspect he was killed because he was investigating Russian money-laundering.
At Mr Young’s inquest, coroner Dr Shirley Radcliffe was told the financier had taken an overdose in 2006, yet medical staff classed it as only a ‘moderate attempt’ to end his life.
He had received frequent help for mental health problems but had been released from hospital because he was deemed ‘low risk’.
He had called both his daughters the day he died, telling Scarlet he was looking forward to seeing her and telling Sasha he would ring her the following day.
Dr Radcliffe found no proof of foul play but, unconvinced Mr Young had committed suicide, she recorded a narrative conclusion, effectively leaving his death unexplained.
Now, fresh eyes may be cast over the maze of secrets and interconnecting lies which made up Scot Young’s life.
The money is long gone, of course. But perhaps the truth about the Cipriani Five – however unappetising – can finally be served.