Ritz sale reveals Barclay family’s power struggle
THE secretive world of British billionaire twins Frederick and David Barclay started to unravel with a hidden camera, and a discrete taping system.
In a video released by Frederick this week, one of David’s sons, Alistair Barclay, is allegedly shown hiding a listening device in the conservatory of the Ritz Hotel to capture private discussions between Frederick and his daughter, Amanda, who were negotiating the sale of the historic hotel near Buckingham Palace.
However, Frederick was worried that someone had been listening to their conversations and got hotel security to install a hidden camera that captured the footage.
The brothers, who spent decades avoiding media attention by isolating themselves on an island in the middle of the English Channel, are now frontpage news due to the latest part of the family’s multi-generational legal dispute over the sale of the Ritz. They handed the family business to the next generation, but Frederick’s lawyers told a London court that David’s three sons are freezing out his daughter, Amanda.
The case offers a glimpse of the divisions in one of the country’s richest clans, which owns the Daily Telegraph newspaper and other businesses at the heart of the UK establishment.
“Unfortunately, this is a classic example of how family enterprises self-destruct,” said Irina Curbelo, co-founder of family business consulting firm Percheron Advisory.
“The Barclays need to remember that 60% of family business failure is because of a lack of open communication and trust. Without rebuilding this, all their businesses, a large part of the family wealth, and the family bonds themselves will be gone.” Hefin Rees, Frederick and Amanda’s lawyer, told a London court at a preliminary hearing earlier this month that the factions’ interests were already “in conflict.”
By listening in, the cousins were able to anticipate Frederick and Amanda’s “every move in advance, plan their business strategy around that” including legal advice they were getting “at this crucial time when their business and personal relationships had broken down,” the attorney said.
“He is a man who is now left to contemplate his nephews’ betrayal and a father who has witnessed the prejudicial treatment of his daughter by her cousins,” Rees told the court, arguing that “this was commercial espionage on a vast scale.”
While the case has been winding its way through the London courts since Frederick and Amanda sued David’s three sons, Alistair, Aidan and Howard, and Aidan’s son Andrew in January, the CCTV footage has given it a new prominence.
The 85-year-old twins are among Britain’s most discreet billionaires, known for a family compound on a tiny island off the UK’s southern coast.
Born to Scottish parents, just 10 minutes apart, they grew up in a west London household so close to a rail road that trains would rattle the windows. After leaving school at 16, the twins joined the accounts department of General Electric.
They teamed up in the 1960s to turn old boarding houses into hotels and moved into breweries and casinos, marking the beginning of their business empire.