THAT’S RICH!
Mandy’s husband was worth £150m. When they split he offered her £5m... but she fought tooth and nail for an equal share — and won £72m ... then she built a lavish portfolio with her new lover. But, he tells the Mail, she won’t give him a penny after breaking up — and is going after HIM for £7m
After she ditched her fabulously rich husband, Mandy Gray bought herself and her physiotherapist lover, Hamish Hurley, a sumptuous new yacht on which they sailed around the world.
Sharing a passion for health and well-being, the pair named their £5million Oyster 825 ‘enso’ after the sacred Buddhist symbol of the same name.
there was nothing Zen, however, about the way Mandy ended her affair with Hamish earlier this year — or the way they are now fighting over £20million of assets acquired during their sixyear relationship.
Hamish, 46, who describes their time together as ‘intense, intimate, loving, consensual and collaborative’ has been accused of being an ‘archetypal gold-digger’ by 50-year-old Mandy’s lawyers.
Speaking exclusively to the Mail this week the former Chelsea- based nutritionist and neuromuscular expert accused his former lover’s legal team of ‘ rewriting our whole relationship’ after claims made in court that he ‘sexually pressurised her and physically abused her’. He says he has around 40,000 WhatsApp messages which prove otherwise.
Mandy, on the other hand, is claiming that Hamish has no right to the spoils gathered during their time together despite them being in joint names. there’s the company shares, an Italian villa, a New Zealand sheep farm and four hypercars currently garaged in Switzerland. She has launched an extraordinary legal bid to stop him getting his hands on what she says is all hers.
Some might say that her stance is a bit rich, given that she fought tooth and nail to stop her wealthy ex-husband doing the same to her by attempting to hang on to wealth accumulated during their marriage, after they separated.
In 2015, Mandy and her texan-born financier husband randy Work made headline news as they battled their way through London’s High Court in one of the most prolonged, bitter and expensive divorces ever seen.
randy, now 52, argued that the £150million fortune amassed during their 18-year marriage had been generated thanks to his ‘genius’ alone.
But after hiring one of the finest divorce lawyers in the land and embarking on a four-year legal battle, Mandy secured herself a half share of her husband’s cash thanks to the years she spent as a wife and the mother of his two children, living in the U. S., Japan, Hong Kong and, finally, a £30million townhouse in London. She walked away from her marriage with £72million, a settlement which included a stable full of world-class three day eventing horses.
Having been put through the legal wringer herself, she might have been expected to show a little more generosity to her erstwhile lover when she, he claims, abruptly ended their liaison in January this year. Yet Hamish’s lawyers say he is set to be left penniless if Mandy and her formidable London legal team get their way in court once again.
this week the Mail tracked Hamish down to the remote rural hamlet of Woodbury in his native New Zealand where he returned to live with his parents on their 60-acre farm, two hours south of Christchurch, soon after his relationship with Mandy ended .
‘We were both incredibly happy and in love for six years and we built a wonderful life together,’ he said. ‘People who know us know that. I’d have taken a bullet for her until the day we broke up. But, for whatever reason, a switch has flipped.’
HIS friends say Mandy’s decision to end their affair, on January 18 was ‘ totally unexpected’ although her lawyers have claimed in court that he was ‘manipulative’ and ‘controlling’.
‘they had shared a happy Christmas in London with friends and family and within weeks it was done and dusted,’ said one.
‘for a while they shared some warm messages but then the lawyers started doing their thing and the shutters came down. It was horrible to hear about because I think Mandy was happier than she had ever been in her life with Hamish and she said so many times.
‘He opened up her mind and
heart in a way it never had been, for all the riches she’d had at her fingertips with randy. It was really love for them.’ So what on earth went wrong? Mandy and Hamish first met in 2009 at the exclusive KX gym in London’s Chelsea, an £8,000-a-year private members’ health club frequented by the likes of Prince Harry and Pippa Middleton.
Mandy was married to financier randy, who had undertaken a gruelling training regime in preparation for a series of triathlons. A keen horsewoman, she was also passionate about keeping fit
Hamish was charging £200 an hour as his reputation soared, with a waiting list of tycoons, pop stars and elite athletes asking for his services, yet lived modestly in a rented flat in Brentford with his Canadian wife tracy.
At the time, randy and Mandy’s marriage appeared to be a happy and highly successful one. the pair, who were both born in the U.S., married in California in 1995 at a time when neither was in possession of a fortune.
their first marital home, a threebedroom detached house in Dallas, texas, was bought with a mortgage and, although currently valued at around £550,000, is a relatively modest property compared to the £30million Kensington townhouse with indoor pool and gym and the £18million Aspen ski chalet they came to own.
the couple’s financial fortunes took a dramatic turn in 1997 after randy was offered a job with texan private equity firm Lone Star and they moved to tokyo where their two children were born, and then, in 2005, to Hong Kong. randy is said to have made around £5.4billion for the company, by buying real estate, including golf courses, after the Japanese economy became stuck in a downturn.
Having made around £150million himself, randy left Lone Star and moved the family to London in 2008. He and Mandy kept staff at their Kensington home and sent their son and daughter to worldrenowned British boarding schools. they also purchased several valuable event horses some of which were ridden by British rider Harry Meade and Olympic equestrian William fox-Pitt.
Once this seemingly perfect marriage came crashing down in 2013, Hamish (who was by then divorced from tracy, with no children) got together with Mandy. randy tried to argue that Mandy was entitled to keep only £5million of her own assets after she refused to accept his initial settlement offer of around £47million paid in instalments. Mandy responded by hiring solicitor fiona Shackleton, now Baroness Shackleton of Belgravia. Known as ‘ Steel Magnolia’ her previous clients include the Prince of Wales and Sir Paul McCartney.
After describing the battle for cash as ‘unedifying, destructive pugilism’, the judge ruled in 2015 that Mandy was entitled to half of the assets built up during the marriage. randy’s attempt to appeal that decision in 2017 failed. the case is still trumpeted as ‘a
resounding victory’ on Baroness Shackleton’s website. It was in the shadow of this ugly, drawn- out spat that Hamish and Mandy embarked on their glittering new life together.
In March 2013, the pair moved into a rented £ 5million mews house in Marylebone before setting out on what was described in court as a ‘long and lavish’ trip to Asia and beyond.
Once Mandy received her £72million settlement, they began broadening their horizons even further. first on an eye-watering shopping list was a rundown but potentially magnificent villa, part of the 16th- century Castello di reschio estate in Umbria, north of rome. A photograph of the couple, hand-in-hand and looking very much in love, featured in Tatler magazine in November 2015.
further millions were spent on a vast sheep and beef station near Wanaka, one of New Zealand’s most picturesque South Island towns. Another seven figure sum was spent on a collection of four hypercars, including a ferrari 458 Speciale and a rare Pagani Huayra Coupe. A home in Malta was rented where they registered several companies in both their names. In 2016 a custom-built, 83ft sailing yacht named Enso was ordered. One yachting magazine, reported ‘her owners were looking to replicate the levels of comfort and well-being that they are accustomed to onshore’.
Launched in Southampton, Hampshire, it joined the Oyster World rally that year with a crew of five. Organisers say Mandy and Hamish joined the yacht in the Canary Islands and sailed across the Atlantic before continuing to New Zealand. family and friends joined them at various stages of their 15-month cruise.
A friend of Hamish told the Mail this week that ‘these were the happiest years of both their lives’ and on an online blog ‘ Our Story — Enso’, the global trip was described as a ‘once in a lifetime experience’.
In New Zealand, Mandy was also said to have been embraced into the family by Hamish’s parents, roydon and Alison, and welcomed to their farm. According to a neighbour, who met her on several occasions, ‘ she would just be mucking in, wearing sweatpants and getting her hands dirty’.
He added: ‘I know roydon and Alison really took to her. They went on holiday with her more than once and it all seemed so happy.’
And yet, despite this seemingly idyllic existence, court submissions last week reveal that Mandy suddenly ended the relationship while she and Hamish were at their rented home in Malta in January.
In the court battle beginning to play out, arguments on behalf of Mandy claim she is the sole owner of all these assets which she financed and never intended to ‘gift’ to Hamish. He will argue they are jointly owned.
According to a ‘skeleton argument’ presented at court on behalf of Hamish last week: ‘Both parties were clearly very saddened by the end of the relationship and exchanged warm messages for a short period of time thereafter. Then things changed. They changed in a manner that frankly has to be read to be believed.’
Hamish will not be drawn on whether a failed business venture was behind Mandy’s decision to end the relationship. One of their projects involved a food supplement of 41 powdered superfoods including broccoli, kelp, kale and milk thistle weed.
Manufactured in the U.S. and named Zuma Juice, it could have been the product that proved to randy that he had not been the only ‘genius’ in the family.
But it went horribly awry following a 2016 online promotional video contrasting an overweight woman in a motorised wheelchair guzzling cheese puffs and fizzy drinks with a super-fit woman making fresh juice. The ad drew a stream of complaints from disability campaigners and Zuma Juice now appears dormant, its Twitter account silent since 2017.
That business, the Mail understands, is key to a claim for around £7million that Mandy is making against her former partner. She is also threatening a private criminal prosecution after alleging that Hamish was ‘manipulative, controlling, that he sexually pressurised her and physically abused her’. He denies those allegations.
Documents presented by Hamish’s lawyers at the High Court last week say: ‘Mandy provided the funds for their joint life together, building for their future. But now she has changed her mind about Hamish, she wants it all back. It seems that the accumulation and preservation of wealth after the fact is a common thread in Mandy’s relationships.’
Hamish told the Mail: ‘I forgive her because underneath it all I know she is just hurting.
‘I’m hoping she and I can resolve this without wasting more of our lives in court because only the lawyers will win.’
Perhaps the most perplexing twist of all in this sorry saga is that none of the protagonists is British. American-born Mandy took up citizenship of St Kitts and Nevis for tax purposes in 2014. Her ex- husband, also U. S.- born, became a citizen of grenada in 2000 for the same reason. In 2012 he took Irish citizenship.
But over the past decade, London has cemented its reputation as the divorce capital of the world thanks to the tendency of English judges to share assets equally between former spouses, and to look, often favourably, upon women. By fighting her exhusband in the High Court, Mandy was able to tear up a post-nuptial agreement drawn up in Texas.
Similarly, Hamish is now fighting to have his case heard in his native New Zealand, where property law treats partners as though they were married and generally divides assets equally if couples, even unmarried ones, separate.
The case is likely to be brutal. Last week Mandy’s QC Jonathan Cohen told the court Hamish was a ‘gold-digger, par excellence,’ and had always planned to use his wealthy lover as a means of getting his ‘wish-list of assets’.
‘It is apparent that Hurley had a grand plan from the very outset,’ added Mr Cohen. Hamish denies such claims. His lawyers say the thousands of social media messages the pair exchanged ‘collectively provide a transcript of their relationship’.
for now then, the exquisite cars are gathering dust in storage in Switzerland. Enso is languishing in a berth in Palma, Mallorca. The couple’s yacht is up for sale. Last month, 250,000 euros was slashed off the asking price, but the £3.4million price tag still places it beyond the reach of most mere mortals. And, for Hamish, now driving around Woodbury in a battered 20-year-old Toyota Hilux, his fall to earth is stark.
The hedonistic days when Enso carried them across the oceans on the voyage of a lifetime must seem like a distant memory.