Marco’s wife is bankrupted by school fees
SHE has described her seemingly unending battle with her estranged husband, TV chef Marco Pierre White, as ‘emotional torture’.
But now, I can reveal, Mati White has just suffered the additional agony of being declared bankrupt.
This fresh humiliation results from legal proceedings taken against her by a private sixth-form college in London which charges basic fees of £30,000 a year.
‘We never comment on school fee disputes with parents,’ says a spokesman for the college, whose alumni include heiress Petra Ecclestone and pop star Lily Allen.
The college filed its petition for bankruptcy on August 27, with the order being granted last week at Kingston upon Thames County Court.
It’s the latest traumatic episode to bedevil Mati, 54, who has three children by Marco whom she married in 2000.
Mati initiated divorce proceedings in 2007, but abandoned them three years later after Marco pleaded with her: ‘Think of our children.’ By that time, their joint legal bill had reached an estimated £3 million.
A year ago, she was given just a few weeks’ notice to leave the five-bedroom house in Chiswick, West London, which Marco rented for her at a cost of £50,000 a year. That drama ended with Marco, 57, consenting to renew the rental agreement, but it also prompted Mati to allege that she was being ‘trapped in a dead marriage’.
It was certainly a volatile one. Mercurial Marco, the first Briton to be awarded three Michelin stars, was frequently absent, prompting Spanish-born Mati to accuse him of affairs with Love Actually star Martine McCutcheon and blonde banker Robin Saunders.
Mati admitted smashing the front and rear windows of Marco’s Range Rover and daubing his West London house in blood and scarlet nail varnish graffiti in 2012. Last year she said that she remained financially dependent on Marco and still yearned for a divorce.
Marco, she added, had told her that they should wait until their youngest child turns 18 — a date which is now just three months away. Mati and Marco decline to comment.