Baroness sues lawyer over £2m fortune loss
A BARONESS is suing her former lawyer after claiming she was tricked into signing over her £2 million fortune.
Jacqueline van Zuylen was allegedly persuaded by Rodney Whiston-Dew to invest her money in a tax-efficient trust in the Seychelles in 2012.
The ‘financially unsophisticated’ baroness had never worked a day in her life and claims she was easily taken in by the ‘impressive’ solicitor, who was a director of the trust.
But the High Court in London heard that when she asked for the money back five years later after losing faith in him, he did not return it. She is now suing him for £4million.
Whiston-Dew, 70, who was jailed for ten years and struck off after being convicted over a £65million investment scam in 2017, denies the baroness’s allegations.
He claims he had been trying to protect her money and ‘rein in her extraordinary’ £200,000-a-year spending habit.
Managing her affairs was ‘extremely time-consuming’ while she jetted around the world on horse-riding expeditions and interior design projects, he said.
Baroness van Zuylen, a divorced mother of one who lives in the Cotswolds village of Little Faringdon, was living on income generated from her savings when she was introduced to Whiston-Dew in 2011.
The money was held in shares, bonds and cash but ‘had not been performing well’, her lawyer Imran Benson said.
The ‘persuasive’ Whiston-Dew offered to invest her money so she would have ‘a monthly income for life’. Court documents at a pre-trial hearing claim that in 2012, the baroness transferred £2,103,619 to a Seychelles-based company of which Whiston-Dew was the director.
He told her the money had been put in a tax-efficient trust and invested in gold and property, Mr Benson said. But when asked to explain what was going on with the money, Whiston-Dew ‘would regularly say it was better for tax reasons to have no paperwork’.
The baroness, who divorced her husband, Baron Thierry van Zuylen before his death in 2011, was paid £846,076 income over the following years, Mr Benson said.
But after losing faith in the arrangement in 2017, she asked for her money back.
The lawyer said: ‘The capital sum has not been returned.’
A full trial is set to go ahead later this year.