Mystery as Ecclestone’s girls skip family Christmas
TAMARA Ecclestone is set to spend Christmas apart from her sister Petra for the first time in a decade.
Tamara, whose £70million West London home was recently targeted in an audacious jewellery heist, will spend the festive season with husband Jay Rutland and their daughter Sophia – known as Fifi – on a skiing trip in Gstaad in the Swiss Alps.
Petra is expected to be almost 6,000 miles away in Los Angeles with her fiance, Sam Palmer.
It is understood that the siblings, the daughters of billionaire Formula 1 mogul Bernie Ecclestone, did not see each other at half-term in October either – unusual given how emotionally close they have always been despite living on opposite sides of the Atlantic.
The news comes after their respective partners decided to call time on their art gallery partnership, less than a year after they started working together. Mr Palmer became a director of Mr Rutland’s new Maddox gallery in Los Angeles after moving to America with Petra and her three children from her marriage to exhusband James Stunt. Petra, 31, was also affiliated to the company but both withdrew last month.
Mr Palmer, 34, a former car salesman from Harlow, Essex, has now set up his own business which provides what he describes as ‘domestic staffing and lifestyle management’.
A source close to the
Ecclestone sisters said: ‘It’s really sad for them.
‘Usually Christmas is a happy time for the girls and their children.
‘It would have been lovely for Tamara to have seen her sister this year, particularly after the robbery. She really has had a rubbish time.’
The 35-year-old was on holiday in Lapland when burglars breached security before gaining access to her 57-bedroom property in Kensington.
Jewellery worth an estimated £50million was stolen.
Hinting of his suspicions that it was an inside job, the sisters’ 89-year-old father Bernie said: ‘It’s certainly a concern that this will have been done by someone with an intimate knowledge of the house and security.’