Sex tape at the centre of £30m court battle
Crude culture at embattled Burford exposed
‘serIOUsLY buff isn’t she.’ ‘Yeah, she’s got a six-pack. she looks after herself but she is pretty plastic.’ ‘sometimes she looks good, often horrendous though.’
this is a snippet from a series of Whatsapp messages sent between alex MacInnes-Ostrouch and Daniel Hall of Burford Capital, the Londonlisted litigation funder which is at the centre of a string of scandals.
the woman they are referring to, later described in court documents as a ‘successful businesswoman in a heavily regulated industry that is reputation sensitive’, appeared in a sex tape which Burford managed to obtain that also featured billionaire shipping magnate Harry sargeant III.
a series of messages published in Us court documents reveal how Hall procured the sex tape from sargeant’s brother while he was investigating the shipping tycoon on behalf of one of his clients.
as well as bank-rolling legal cases in return for a cut of the winnings, Burford also operates a business unit headed by Hall and charged with hunting down the assets of the super-rich.
In this case, Burford was acting for sargeant’s former business partner Mohamad al-saleh.
sargeant and al-saleh had formerly run an oil shipping business together, delivering fuel to Us soldiers operating in the Middle east.
But after falling out and working through a fractious court battle, a judge held that sargeant owed his ex-partner almost £30m.
Hall, armed with a team of researchers and a ruthless nose for information, went hunting for sargeant’s assets, stumbling across the sex tape in the process. Court filings expose how Hall then sent pictures taken from the video to several of his colleagues, along with the message: ‘Look what I have… Ho ho ho. a “viewing” is probably worth having back in London.’
When sending the video to another colleague in the Us, Hall added: ‘You’ll never look at a banana the same way again.’
the messages cast light on the culture at Burford, whose shares have tumbled following a separate attack on its accounting practices by hedge fund Muddy Waters.
though courts in the Us and switzerland have found that the video was obtained lawfully, Harry sargeant has refused to let the matter lie. But more details of Burford’s conduct will be dragged under the spotlight as it attempts to sue him this year for the money he owes his ex-partner.
In a statement, Hall said: ‘as part of our work in collecting on a previous fraud judgment against sargeant, I lawfully obtained a cache of 168,000 emails from his former employer and brother.
‘the video in question was never deployed in any fashion nor distributed externally and steps were taken during subsequent litigation to anonymise the other party involved.’