Tycoon’s ex fears she was target of Skripal poisoner
‘Always afraid of something’
THE ex-fiancée of a Scots businessman who died in a mystery fall from his London home claims she has been threatened by someone who boasted they were behind the poisoning of spy Sergei Skripal.
Noelle Reno had broken off her engagement to failed property tycoon Scot Young in 2014, shortly before he was found impaled on railings below his £2million Marylebone flat.
At the time, she said Dundee-born Mr Young was heavily in debt after a disastrous land deal in Moscow.
Miss Reno says she then received an anonymous email with a demand for £50,000 from a person claiming to be behind the attempted killing of Russian double agent Skripal, warning: ‘The devil has come for his dues.’
The former model and US socialite, who believes Mr Young was driven to suicide by those to whom he owed money, fled Britain two months later.
She told the Sunday Times: ‘It was a week after the [Skripal] poisoning and whoever had written the email was claiming the assassination attempt as their “handiwork”.
‘They warned me that a similar poison to the novichok used in Salisbury had already been planted in my home and I could expect a slow and painful death. The next few weeks were horrendous... the nightmares were intense.’
Miss Reno said she took the threat seriously as she was convinced Mr Young had become involved with the Russian mafia and had made some powerful enemies during his business dealings.
‘The most terrifying thing about [the threat] was that I knew it could be true,’ she said. ‘When Scot died he owed money to at least 20 people, including me. I always knew he had done business with various nefarious characters and I now believe he almost certainly crossed paths with the Russian mafia.’
In the wake of the Salisbury poisonings, the then Home Secretary Amber Rudd announced the security services would be re-examining all the deaths flagged up by the FBI as having possible links to Russia and organised crime, including Mr Young’s.
Miss Reno, who has a young son, said: ‘I had to consider that my son’s life could also be in danger. The email instructed me not to tell the police or my father, a federal prosecutor in America. Over the next few hours I did both of these things – then I left Britain.
‘The email was passed on to the intelligence unit and the police said they would watch my home. Two days later, a friend in California received an email telling her to make me pay or my son would be in danger.
‘The day after that, two hours before the deadline, another threat arrived in my inbox to remind me time was running out.’
Miss Reno refused to pay and later returned to London, but then left for security reasons.
Police found the email had come from a server in Zurich but Swiss law blocked efforts to identify the sender.
Mr Young, who was close to retailer Sir Philip Green and various Russian oligarchs, grew up in a Dundee tenement and made his fortune in the 1980s property boom.
By the time he started a relationship with Miss Reno in 2008, he was involved in a bitter multi-million pound divorce from his exwife Michelle, and his businesses were nosediving after the giant Project Moscow property investment deal imploded in mysterious circumstances. Miss Reno said: ‘There is every likelihood the Russian mafia was involved in the Project Moscow deal – Scot was always afraid of something.’
The couple had been through a break-up when on December 8, 2014, she was walking along Baker Street in London and he called her on her mobile, saying he was going to jump out of the window.
‘He was talking and talking, which is what Scot did when he was trying to tie you in a knot,’ she said. ‘I hung up because that was the only way to make him stop. I didn’t think he meant it.’
But on reaching a café she called the police: ‘Ten minutes later, armed police pulled up and told me they’d found him on the railings outside our flat.
‘The FBI suspects that the Russians were involved in Scot’s death, as well as a number of other apparent suicides on British soil.’