The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - The Telegraph Magazine
For love and money
Saudi billionaire Walid Juffali led a life of unsurpassed extravagance in almost total secrecy – until his second ex-wife, Christina Estrada, blew the lid on their spending. Now the family home is up for sale. Rosa Silverman takes the tour
Lifting the lid on the extravagant lifestyle and multimillion-pound divorce of Saudi businessman and art collector Walid Juffali. By Rosa Silverman
Down a gently winding lane in a leafy part of Surrey, set behind an imposing pair of iron gates, sits a little-known mansion called Bishopsgate House. One of several British homes belonging to the Saudi billionaire Walid Juffali, this sprawling piece of late-victorian property, acquired from his parents about 15 years ago, once teemed with life. With three butlers, six gardeners, five maids, two laundry girls, two drivers, two personal assistants, two nannies and an estate manager on the staff, there was no shortage of industrious activity on the 42-acre estate. It was here that the second of Sheikh Walid’s three wives, Christina Estrada, a former Pirelli-calendar model, once lived. And it was here that he kept much of his breathtaking collection of art and antique furniture.
Following Juffali’s death from cancer in July 2016, at the age of 61, Bishopsgate House is to be emptied and the property sold. Its contents will be auctioned by Bonhams on 26 March in a vast garage in the grounds, among them paintings, antiques, sculptures and objets d’art. The sale’s 450 lots will also include items from Juffali’s Knightsbridge pied-à-terre, St Saviours House, and his seaside bolthole outside Dartmouth in Devon.
It is estimated at £4 million in total, though in single-owner sales, objects frequently soar way above estimate. The collection’s highlights include works by Colombian sculptor Fernando Botero and a stainless-steel dish by Anish Kapoor valued at between £300,000 and £400,000. International interest in the auction is likely to be intense. ‘I expect there’ll be 30 to 40 different countries bidding, if not more,’ says Charlie Thomas, director of private collections and house sales at Bonhams and one of the two men from the auction house who will bring down the hammer on Juffali’s treasures next month.
Unusually, there will be no reserve price on anything under £50,000, so the sale is a tempting prospect for bargain hunters. But it will offer something else besides: the chance to take a rare peek into the private world of a member of one of the wealthiest business empires in Saudi Arabia, a man whose fortune has been estimated at some £8 billion.
Single-owner sales tend to happen because of the ‘three Ds’: death, divorce or destitution. Only the first two come into play in this instance…
The last time we had a glimpse of the family’s lifestyle was in June 2016, when Estrada made a jaw-dropping request for £196 million in her divorce from Juffali. The court heard she wanted more than £55 million for property and a £1 million-ayear clothing budget – including £40,000 for fur coats, £109,000 for couture dresses and £21,000 for shoes. ‘That is what they cost,’ she explained. She also needed 35 watches a year (‘It depends what I’m wearing and needs to go with my outfit’) and £50,000 a year for Christmas dinners.
Justifying her demands, she told the court, ‘I am Christina Estrada. I was a top international model. I have lived this life. This is what I am accustomed to.’
She later said she was attempting to ‘stand up for women’. Though her lifestyle was seen as ‘extraordinary, wonderful, magical’, she claimed, it was a ‘hard life full of responsibilities’. Justin Warshaw QC, who acted for Juffali, said at the time that ‘to describe her budget without resort to hyperbole is quite difficult. We are firmly in “gasp” territory.’
Juffali, meanwhile, had claimed he was entitled to diplomatic immunity from Estrada’s claim because of his status as a permanent representative to the International Maritime Organisation for the Caribbean island of Saint Lucia. The Court of Appeal ruled that he was indeed entitled to diplomatic immunity, but because he was permanently resident in the UK he was not immune from this legal action since the divorce claim did not relate to the exercise of his diplomatic duties.
In the end, on 8 July, 2016, he was ordered to pay out £75 million in maintenance to Estrada for her ‘reasonable needs’, making him the loser in one of the biggest divorce settlements in British legal history. He died nine days before the deadline set by the High Court for him to pay the settlement. But Estrada, it is understood, has since received her due.
An insider says, ‘There is a big auction and it is all by agreement. There is money for his third wife, money for the second wife and money for all his daughters.
‘Christina got what the court said she should. It’s all confidential but people got what they wanted. That has allowed this sale to go ahead.’
The Estrada-juffali marriage ended less than 13 years after their 2001 wedding in Dubai, after Estrada, who is American, discovered her husband had a new partner, a Lebanese-born model and television presenter 35 years his junior called Loujain Adada. He decided to marry her while still married to Estrada, which was permissible under Saudi Arabian law. It was not per-
missible to Estrada, though, and the couple were divorced in Saudi Arabia in September 2014 via the Muslim ‘triple talaq’ process. (Juffali divorced Estrada by saying ‘talaq’, or ‘divorce’, three times while in Jeddah, without Estrada knowing.)
Juffali was, by this stage, no stranger to high-profile divorces. He had married his first wife, Basma Alsulaiman, in 1980, and is reported to have had three children with her. They lived in a marble palace in Jeddah, hosting guests such as Margaret Thatcher, John Major and George Bush. When their marriage ended in 2000, Juffali was ordered to pay Sulaiman a $40 million settlement.
He went on to have a daughter with Estrada, and when his second round of divorce proceedings came to the British courts, the lid was lifted on their lavish lifestyle. According to the High Court judgement, holidays with his second wife were ‘spent cruising in the Mediterranean, skiing in Gstaad and spending time in Venice and Jeddah’.
An insider recalls seeing the couple seated in the dining room at Bishopsgate House before a table groaning with food. ‘They just picked at it,’ he says.
Juffali’s third wedding was held in Venice, at an estimated cost of £10 million. With Adada he had another two daughters.
While his love life was colourful, his family life was in another respect tragic: in 2008, Juffali’s brother, Tarek, died at the age of 40 after overdosing on the morphine and chloral hydrate he had been prescribed to wean him off the 30 joints of skunk cannabis he smoked daily. He had also been addicted to cocaine, heroin and Rohypnol. Having tried to beat his habit, as his wife was pregnant with twins, he was reportedly found dead in his bed by staff at his Belgravia home.
Walid Juffali, however, had made a great success of himself. Educated at Le Rosey in Switzerland, the University of San Diego, then Imperial College London, where he received a doctorate in neuroscience, in 2005 he became chairman of EA Juffali & Bros. The conglomerate was founded in 1946 by his father, Sheikh Ahmed, and his brothers Ebrahim and Ali, with a focus on infrastructure projects. In his free time, Juffali became a collector, starting in the early 1980s with old masters and moving on to modern art and sculpture in the ’90s. He bought works by Picasso, Andy Warhol, Joan Miró and Anish Kapoor.
‘One of his mottos was, “Life is a treasure hunt,”’ says his daughter Dina, 35, one of two he had with Sulaiman. ‘Collecting was an emotional experience for him so [his collection] was really a labour of love. He liked what he bought and he bought what he liked.’
Which is not to say there was no vision behind, or coordination of, the gradual amassing of beautiful objects that has come to define his legacy. There are distinct
Juffali was ordered to pay out £75 million to his second wife for her ‘reasonable needs’
aesthetics in his Knightsbridge and Surrey homes, each quite different from the other. The converted church near Harrods he bought about four years ago, which was valued at £50 million in 2013, has a light, airy, modern feel, for all its gothic arches, vaulted ceilings and enduring gargoyles. Near the entrance hang a couple of paintings by Miró. A cabinet beside the fully laid dining table contains Veuve Clicquot bottles of every different measure. (About 200 bottles of wine from across the three properties will be sold in the auction.) The basement swimming pool is all clean lines and minimalist elegance. An extravagant boutique hotel springs to mind.
With St Saviours, Bishopsgate House shares only its opulence. The Surrey property feels, as Thomas points out, very 19th century. ‘It’s very much your traditional country-house look. But unlike a lot of the country houses whose contents we sell, there’s no faded grandeur here,’ he says, as we walk through the unpeopled rooms, taking in the Persian rugs, rock-crystal chandeliers, Italian-marble tabletops, gilt-panelled walls and moulded ceilings. There are nine bedrooms in total, all with dressing rooms: perfect for a man who, by all accounts, enjoyed entertaining.
Estate manager Simon Matthews says, ‘They had parties with marquees, they had family weddings and they had lots of international guests.’
One such party was a birthday bash thrown by Juffali for one of his daughters. In attendance, reports a former member of staff, were Sir Elton John, Mohamed Al-fayed and Prince Andrew. Cirque du Soleil performed in an enormous marquee in the grounds.
‘There were hundreds of guests,’ says a former estate resident who was present. ‘The tent was divided into two and there was a massive waterfall across it, and a drawbridge.’
On New Year’s Eve 1999, Juffali’s parents, who then owned the property, threw a party to see in the new millennium, says a former member of staff. Politicians, film stars and royalty were there.
Yet for all the star-studded guest lists, and the location of this slice of prime Home Counties real estate on the edge of Windsor Great Park, relatively little is known about the Egham mansion and goings-on there over the years. During the Second World War, the headquarters of 4 Wireless Group, which trained high-speed wireless and keyboard operators, was there. It was later acquired by a Swiss businessman called Hans Willi, who then sold it to Juffali’s father in the early 1980s.
‘Ahmed was a marvellous man,’ says a former employee who worked for him on the estate. ‘He was very quiet and never showed off. They were a multilingual family who brought their children up speaking German as a first language and also Arabic and English. All the nannies they employed were German.’
The member of staff adds, ‘Mrs Juffali [Walid’s mother, Su’ad] was a very nice woman and you got treated really well by her. She knew how to look after staff.’
Of course, Ahmed and Su’ad were often absent, however. ‘They used to spend months cruising in their yachts, and she had an apartment in France so the family came and went,’ says the former employee.
Then, when Walid, the eldest son, took over the property, he began to refurbish it in his own taste. ‘He pulled the place apart,’ the member of staff continues bluntly.
‘He reckoned he spent about £30 million doing the place up,’ recalls another source. ‘It took almost two years. The indoor riding school, where they kept seven or eight horses, was converted into a garage. He altered the swimming pool.’
Juffalibrought in some of the artworks he’d acquired, stamping his mark on the old English home that was now in his possession. Or, as Dina puts it, ‘carrying on [from what his parents had done] and developing his own style. His parents were big on Regency furniture,’ she says, ‘so it’s something he grew up with, but then he developed his own take on it… [and] he ended up acquiring a lot.’
The pool and its environs became known as the Chihuly spa, named after the American glass sculptor Dale Chihuly, whose work Juffali so adored, and with whom he was personally acquainted. Suspended above the now-empty indoor shell-shaped pool is an enormous Chihuly chandelier composed of blue and turquoise blown glass.
Estimated at between £60,000 and £100,000, it is one of the auction’s most notable pieces, along with another by the same artist – the Thames Skiff, estimated at £40,000 to £60,000 and currently located outdoors on a lawn so vast that its furthest reaches cannot be seen from the house. As well as the extensive grounds, the next proprietor of Bishopsgate will also inherit Juffali’s helipad.
‘I always thought of Bishopsgate House as an art immersion,’ says Dina. ‘You see that with the Chihuly
For his daughter’s birthday, ‘there was a massive waterfall, and a drawbridge’
above the pool. It’s been fascinating growing up in these houses, constantly surrounded by art. It’s like you’re in a treasure trove; it’s phenomenal.’
Juffali discovered his illness not long after marrying Adada. When he died, the youngest children he left behind were both under two. Unlike their older half-sisters, they will not grow up surrounded by their father’s precious art collection, walking among the Chihulys or running between Botero’s enormous Adam and Eve, which sit on their father’s lawn, waiting to be snapped up by a hungry buyer with the space to display such giant sculptures. But his youngest daughters, like the others, will have known his love. ‘He had such a big heart,’ says Dina.
The Walid Juffali Collection will be offered at the Impressionist and Modern Art Sale on 1 March at Bonhams New Bond Street, London W1, and on-site at Bishopsgate House, Englefield Green, Egham TW2 on 26 March, starting at 10am. Previews will be held at the house on 23-25 March. For further details of the lots on offer, and to request a catalogue, visit bonhams.com