Princess’s bank fight over £135m fortune
Bitter feud over family fortune – and a £50m Gauguin – set to flare up in the British courts
GIANT French bank BNP Paribas has been locked in a hugely complex inheritance dispute with an Italian business dynasty for over a decade. Now Princess Camilla Crociani de Bourbon des Deux Siciles – the daughter of industrialist Camillo Crociani – hopes to end the dispute over a €250 million (£222 million) trust fund with a new round of legal showdowns in the UK and Jersey.
She claims BNP Paribas mismanaged the family’s Jersey-based trust fund and is pursuing lawsuits to make the bank restore £135 million to the trust and claim at least £60 million in damages.
In the latest twist in the ten-year battle, Princess Camilla will on Tuesday launch an appeal in the Royal Court in Jersey to overturn a ruling that she concealed her mother’s assets, including a painting by Paul Gauguin valued at £50 million.
And, separately, her two daughters, Chiara, 16, and Carolina, 17, are set to pursue legal action in the Privy Council in London to reconstitute the trust – and recover the £135 million they claim it is owed.
It is now expected that the hearing, originally due to take place last year, will be held in the second half of 2021. Meanwhile, a criminal case brought against BNP by Princess Camilla and her mother is under way in Monaco, seeking a minimum of £60 million damages.
Speaking from her home in the South of France, Princess Camilla – who is married to Prince Carlo, Duke of Castro – told The Mail on Sunday: ‘This has all started from the breach of trust done by a professional trustee and unfortunately this has led to more than a decade of litigation. This year we are determined to see through the litigation and see the original trust restored. We want BNP to accept they are guilty and to pay damages.’
The trust fund at the centre of the dispute, called the Grand Trust, was set up in 1987 by Princess Camilla’s mother Edoarda Crociani, an Italian actress who performed under the stage name Edy Vessel.
The funds were intended to benefit Camilla and her younger sister Cristiana – and, eventually, their descendants – following the death i n 1980 of t heir f ather Camillo, who built up an engineering group called Vitrociset SpA as well as a multi-million pound collection of fine art.
THE family appointed BNP Paribas’ wealth management arm in Jersey as a trustee to manage the funds, held in Switzerland. In 2010, the Grand Trust was dissolved and the funds moved to a new trust.
Following the restructuring, in 2013 Princess Camilla’s sister Cristiana Delrieu sued the fund’s three trustees, led by BNP Paribas Jersey Trust Corporation, because she did not approve of the transfer of the funds.
Cristiana won the case in 2017 after a court in Jersey found that BNP had mismanaged the trust and restructured it unlawfully. Court documents from a three- month trial show that Miles Le Cornu, who ran BNP’s wealth management business in Jersey, admitted he proposed the idea of moving the assets out of the Grand Trust into another trust.
Under the ruling, the trustees were ordered to reconstitute the whole of the Grand Trust, which was originally worth around €250 million, including cash, shares and paintings such as Gauguin’s Hina Maruru. They were also ordered to compensate Cristiana, who has been paid $115 million by BNP for her share of the trust.
BNP then sued Princess Camilla’s mother Edoarda, who was liable as a trustee for recouping the outstanding funds.
As part of the case, in 2018 they asked Princess Camilla to disclose details of her mother’s wealth. She signed seven affidavits disclosing all the details of her mother’s assets to her knowledge.
But the Royal Court in Jersey found those affidavits were not true and ruled in 2019 she was in contempt of court on the basis that she knew where her mother’s assets were located.
In a judgment handed down last month, the Jersey court said Princess Camilla was involved in the transfer of her mother’s paintings from Singapore to Switzerland, and eventually to a storage vault in Miami. The court found that the paintings were owned by a new trust called Apollo, which appeared to benefit Princess Camilla and her daughters. Last month’s judgment upheld the earlier contempt of court and handed Princess Camilla a £2 million fine.
Princess Camilla’s lawyer said she was appealing because she was unable to answer questions about her mother’s assets as she did not know their location. The fine will be suspended if her appeal this week is successful.
Princess Camilla has previously been denied permission to appeal in the Privy Council to recover her share of the trust fund. She said her daughters had been ‘disinherited’ by the wrangling over the trust, adding: ‘How could beneficiaries who counted on the trust and an organisation find themselves suddenly completely disinherited from what was a plan for their succession from their grandmother?’
A statement from a spokesman said: ‘Princess Camilla... denounces all the misleading and destabilising actions brought by the BNP Paribas group, which has been found guilty of having betrayed the trust of the Crociani family.’
It added: ‘The BNP group is... multiplying all kinds of legal actions in order to damage the image of its former clients and her family.’
BNP Paribas declined to respond to a request for comment.