Phones4U boss ‘asked heiress to sign away right to have children’
BILLIONAIRE John Caudwell asked a French wine heiress to sign away her right to have children before going into business with her, a judge heard yesterday.
Nathalie Dauriac-Stoebe also told the High Court the phones tycoon hired a private eye to ‘dig up dirt’ on her when they fell out in a row over her expenses.
The financial expert, 39, said a bug had been put under her car and her emails hacked, although she could not prove who was responsible.
The former chief executive claims she was forced out of the wealth management firm they founded in 2009 after the Phones 4U founder, 65, orchestrated an ‘elaborate conspiracy’ against her.
Lawyers for Signia Wealth claim she ‘stole’ more than £33,000 in expenses and would have been sacked had she not resigned.
Miss Dauriac-Stoebe took the witness stand yesterday in the bitter
‘He stole my business’
legal dispute to deny she had stolen from the fund to pay for personal holidays and beauty treatments.
She is suing the fund for wrongful dismissal and demanding compensation, claiming she was forced to sell her share of the firm for just £2 when it was worth closer to £17million.
In a witness statement she said Mr Caudwell had tried to get her to sign an agreement to confirm she would not have children when they became business partners.
Miss Dauriac-Stoebe told Mr Justice Marcus Smith that she did not agree to the ‘condition’, but did pledge not to have children until the new business was ‘firmly established’. Now a mother of children aged five and three, she said she had worked up until the day before the birth of her first child and only taken a week off before returning to work.
Miss Dauriac-Stoebe said: ‘It goes without saying I would have liked nothing more than to spend more time with my young children, but I felt unable to do so given the understanding I reached with Mr Caudwell that I would always put the business as a top priority in my life.’
She also said in her witness statement that she became ‘increasingly scared’ of him – and her solicitors later stated he had hired a private investigator ‘to dig up dirt’ about her. Miss Dauriac-Stoebe said Mr Caudwell hired the PI through PR firm Bell Pottinger, adding: ‘I had the feeling of being followed and so I hired my own investigator to check my and my family’s security.
‘My investigator found traces of a bug which was put under my car and found out my emails were hacked.’
Mr Caudwell’s lawyers say she wrongly claimed expenses for flying across the globe to see him – visits he considered to be personal holidays.
Miss Dauriac-Stoebe – who said she worked ‘24/7’ for the firm – agreed she had been good friends with the tycoon, but insisted everything she did had been for the benefit of the company, adding: ‘I will not apologise for doing my job.’
After an investigation was launched into her expenses claims, she told Mr Caudwell she was sorry and offered to pay back around £26,000. But yesterday she said she had only admitted wrongdoing to save the company she feared he would liquidise, adding: ‘Signia was my baby. I would have done anything to protect it.’
She continued: ‘I spent six years building that business. He stole my business for £2.’ The judge was told Mr Caudwell had threatened to report her to the police at a meeting at his Mayfair mansion in late 2014.
She said: ‘I was sitting on the pavement outside the house crying and Mr Caudwell was shouting and screaming at me.’
The court also heard he asked her to take a lie detector test. The former Coutts banker denied her expense claims were ‘fraudulent and dishonest’ and said she had been cleared in an internal investigation.
Yet Miss Dauriac-Stoebe said after she left the firm in December 2014, Mr Caudwell – who was in court yesterday – had ‘quite simply’ tried to ‘destroy my reputation in the market’ and make her ‘unemployable’.
Both sides deny the accusations. The trial continues.