Oil tycoon’s ex sues the Queen’s solicitors... for only getting her £6m of a £10m divorce payout
WHEN she divorced one of Britain’s richest men, Lucy Adair expected to get a £10million settlement.
But the ex-wife of oil tycoon Robert Adair claims she never received her full payout. Now she has accused the Queen’s solicitors Farrer & Co, who represented her, of failing to secure the cash.
The 53-year-old, who has since remarried and is called Lucy Linzee Gordon, is suing the law firm for £3.8million. It is fighting the claim, saying that any loss was because she failed to follow their advice.
She and Mr Adair married in 1995 and have four sons. When the marriage collapsed in 2009, Mr Adair sold their magnificent matrimonial home, Cowesby Hall in North Yorkshire, for £9.25million, as well as the nearby Grosmont estate, to help fund the divorce.
Mrs Linzee Gordon initially agreed to give up her entitlement to half of Mr Adair’s wealth in return for £16million. Mr Adair responded by offering £10million – but on terms that ‘left her shaking with rage and very upset’, according to a writ served at the High Court. However, she later accepted an offer of £10million in instalments. She received the first two payments but £3.8million, due in June 2015, was not paid after Mr Adair’s businesses ran into difficulty, the writ alleges.
Mrs Linzee Gordon claims Richard Parry, head of family law at Farrer & Co, failed to secure her divorce settlement. She says the firm should have insisted on a security from Mr Adair, and claims Mr Parry should have known this was necessary because, the writ alleges, he had warned her that her former husband was highly sophisticated and ‘might be pulling the wool over the eyes of the banks from time to time and he might also be doing that to us’.
As a result, she claims, Mr Adair was able to default on the agreement, leaving her £3,801,307 out of pocket. Farrer & Co denies the allegations, saying the problem was caused by Mrs Linzee Gordon – herself a former solicitor – wishing to stay on good terms with her ex.
Mr Adair, 62, had headed Melrose Resources and, before he faced insolvency proceedings, had featured in the Sunday Times Rich List with a fortune estimated at more than £200million. During the divorce in 2009, Mr Parry emailed Mr Adair saying: ‘At the heart of all Lucy’s concerns lies the thought that although you have been a man of enormous wealth, there is some risk, hopefully only a small one, that you could end up insolvent.’ Mrs Linzee Gordon, who lives with her second husband Andrew, 51, at Upsland Farm in the Yorkshire Dales, alleges that Farrer & Co used a financial report prepared by Mr Adair’s own accountants, Saffery Champness, which did not properly evaluate his wealth. In its defence filed to the court, Farrer & Co blames Mrs Linzee Gordon for the misfortune. It says she caused and contributed to her own loss in deciding to settle with her husband, despite the firm’s advice, rather than pursue the divorce through the courts. The firm argues she was told of the advantages of security, how it could be obtained, and her right to enforce it by going to court, but made the informed choice not to do so until November 2015. Farrer & Co claims she is the cause of her own loss by deciding not to enforce her rights over security, to avoid aggravating Mr Adair or risking his insolvency, so she could receive regular payments. She also settled for too little – disregarding the firm’s advice that she was giving up her true entitlement – and negligently entered into a second settlement with Mr Adair in June 2016, it says. No date has been set for a hearing.