What happened to Hutchence’s missing millions?
As a new film about the charismatic INXS frontman opens, James Hall wonders what became of his enormous estate
Mystify, the new documentary about the late INXS singer Michael Hutchence, sheds new light on his music, his string of high-profile relationships and his untimely suicide in a Sydney hotel room in 1997.
Built around candid interviews with friends, family and lovers – including Helena Christensen and Kylie Minogue – the film portrays Hutchence as a sweet-natured dreamer, whose charisma took INXS from Sydney pubs to Wembley Stadium before his life came to an abrupt end. It’s a detailed and moving insight into one of rock’s great frontmen. But one area of Hutchence’s life left unresolved by the film is the issue of his missing millions.
Despite selling an estimated 60 million albums, including 1987’s 20 million-selling Kick, Hutchence died almost penniless. An executor’s report sent to his family eight years after his death stated that the 37-year-old had just Aus$506 (£266) in cash at the time of his death, and his share of INXS’S bank balance was $572 (£300).
While the band’s popularity had waned by the mid-nineties, it beggars belief that one of the world’s biggest rock stars could die with so little. So what happened? The millions, of course, existed; industry estimates put Hutchence’s earnings at between $10 million and $20 million.
Did he spend it all? Or are rumours of a cocktail of opaque investments, characters with questionable motives, shelter companies in tax havens such as the Cayman Islands, rock star excess and a lack of sensible oversight, the answer? Either way, it has meant that Hutchence’s family, including Heavenly Hiraani Tiger Lily, his 23-year-old daughter with the late TV presenter Paula Yates, has received next to nothing.
Although Mystify doesn’t delve into Hutchence’s finances, Richard Lowenstein, the film’s director – who was close friends with the singer – has spoken to Tiger Lily, as Hutchence’s daughter is now known, about her father’s financial affairs. Lowenstein says all that Tiger Lily has received from Hutchence’s former business manager, Colin Diamond, who oversaw his earnings and was a coexecutor of his will, is an envelope containing £500 in cash. “The one thing [Tiger] is quite disturbed about, is that there doesn’t seem to be any legal or financial acknowledgement that she’s her father’s daughter,” the director told the No Filter with Mia Freedman podcast in June.
“I was saying, ‘Maybe [the money’s] still going to come to you when you’re 25’ and she – when she’d stopped laughing – said, ‘We’ve given up on that’,” he told the podcast.
Details of Hutchence’s supposed financial arrangements have emerged piecemeal over the years. Certain strands are contained in Just a Man, a 2000 biography by his sister Tina Hutchence and late mother Patricia Glassop. More information came out when the executors of his will released a report in 2005, and a further tranche of revelations came with the 2017 leaking of the so-called Paradise Papers, a cache of 13.4 million files that highlighted the use of offshore tax havens.
Before INXS took off, money was scarce for Hutchence and his five bandmates. Even when cash started rolling during the mid-eighties with Listen Like Thieves and then Kick, Hutchence was a typical rock star: music mattered to him, not book-keeping.
“From the beginning, Michael did not have the time, indeed did not want to take the time, for the business side of his work. Although he believed in investing for the future, he wanted to concentrate on making music,” his sister Tina writes in Just a Man.
So, as many rock stars do, he outsourced his financial management, but continued to spend prodigiously. What remains unclear is whether he intended that the assets he bought should remain his or whether he was, in effect, giving them away. Through advisers, he is thought to have set up trust funds with company names in tax havens to lighten his tax burden. His name would not necessarily be on the trusts, unless in a beneficiary capacity. Royalty cheques could be paid into such trusts, Tina says in Just a Man.
Hutchence is thought to have paid for some assets in cash before their ownership was transferred into the trusts. For example, in 1990 he reportedly paid $1.5 million in cash for a villa in Roquefort les Pins in the south of France. The house was then set up under a company name – Leagueworks Pty Ltd – based in Monaco. But who it actually belonged to remains a mystery.
Just before Christmas 1991, he bought a block of land, sight unseen, in Southport on Australia’s Gold Coast for $1.3 million cash. Tina confirmed that Colin Diamond closed the deal with Hutchence’s approval. The land was put into a trust company called Nextcircle. And, in January 1994, the singer bought a bowling alley in Labrador, Queensland, for $2.25 million cash. The company that owned it was called Nexcess. According to The Sydney Morning Herald, the company’s directors were Diamond and Tony Alford, a Gold Coast accountant.
Similarly, Hutchence’s music rights were held through a British Virgin Islands company called Chardonnay Investments.
The singer appears to have been, at best, hugely unsophisticated about financial matters. His mother Patricia recalled walking into a room in her house in the mid-nineties to find Hutchence standing over a fax machine feeding it pages with just his signature on them. She assumed they were autographs for fans. No, he said: the faxes were needed for some business transactions.
It was around this period that Hutchence also paid £1 million in cash for a property in La Spezia Court on the Gold Coast’s Isle of Capri, again sight unseen – it came with a Bentley thrown in – and he planned to rent it out, although he had been told that the rent would not be high because the house was rundown.
In the end, his accountant Colin Diamond and Colin’s brother Stephen lived there temporarily, Tina writes. Other purchases at this time included land on an island off Lombok.
Shortly after Tiger Lily was born, Hutchence rewrote his will. After charity donations to Amnesty International and Greenpeace, he bequeathed 50 per cent of his assets to Tiger – which she would not see until she was 25 – with the remainder going to five family members. The will’s executors were Andrew Paul, who was Hutchence’s Hong Kongbased accountant, and Colin Diamond. Stephen Diamond witnessed the document’s signing on October 3 1996.
Hutchence’s death the following year devastated his family and made headlines around the world. But it was afterwards that the tangled reality of his financial situation became clear.
In December 1997, Tina faxed her brother’s executors requesting use of the French villa for a period in 1998. The reply she got from Stephen Diamond shocked her. “It stated that Michael had never in his lifetime owned a villa in the south of France,” Tina wrote.
“Over the following three months, we would be told that Michael’s London home was not his, nor did he own a Peugeot, an Aston Martin, a Mercedes Jeep, a Cherokee Jeep, a Bentley, a Ducati motorcycle or various other vehicles I knew to be his. The home on the Isle of Capri – even though this was listed as his domicile at the time of his death
– the bowling alley and the block of land in downtown Southport were also evidently figments of our imagination,” Tina wrote. Further, not even Hutchence’s ongoing income from the publishing and performing rights of his music belonged to him. In other words, nothing that Hutchence “owned” was technically his. “It was as if he had never existed,” his sister noted.
A nasty battle played out in the Australian media. The family cried foul over the whereabouts of his money, while the other side argued that the trusts had been established to protect the money for Tiger
Lily. The family were portrayed as money-hungry.
In April 1998, members of Hutchence’s family took the executors to the Supreme Court in Queensland. If Hutchence had no assets, they figured, then why would he have made a will in the first place? They sought declarations that the assets were in fact owned by Hutchence at the time of his death and should therefore form part of his estate to be distributed to the beneficiaries he’d named in his will. Amnesty International joined as a plaintiff. No side won. With the family’s costs ballooning to AUS$500,000, the litigation went to mediation. The two sides settled (some reports suggested that the family didn’t get enough money to cover their costs). But the skirmish didn’t answer the fundamental question of what Hutchence’s estate was worth.
The answer came in the summer of 2005 when his mother, who died in 2010, received the executor’s report via Hong Kong law form Boase Cohen & Collins. The singer’s estate was worth zero. Hutchence had just over $1,000 cash when he died, and after the sale of certain items and steep estate outgoings (including legal fees of $670,000), there was nothing left for beneficiaries. None of the assets – the villas, the Gold Coast properties, the house in London’s Chelsea – were included in the executor’s report.
Another piece of the convoluted, if unfinished, jigsaw came out with the Paradise Papers in 2017. An investigation into the papers by Four Corners, the Australian documentary series, and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalism found that in 2015 Colin Diamond had lawfully sought to set up a Mauritian company called Helipad Plain, whose aim was the “commercial exploitation of the sound recordings, images, films and related materials embodying the performance of Michael Hutchence”.
He could do this, it turned out, because Diamond became the sole owner of Chardonnay Investments, which owned all the intellectual property rights in Hutchence’s estate, on the singer’s death. It also emerged that Hutchence’s share in the publishing rights to INXS’S music were sold to Warner Chappell, with proceeds going to Chardonnay Investments.
Despite all this, it is still unclear what happened to the millions he earned. The Telegraph’s attempts to contact Colin Diamond for his comments were unsuccessful, but when asked in 1998 where the money was by a journalist from the now-defunct music magazine axs, Diamond replied: “None of your business. That’s the point; it’s private. Don’t you guys get it? It’s private.”
Of course, Hutchence is not the first rock star to lose his money. Fleetwood Mac co-founder Mick Fleetwood has said he’s “lost count” of how many times he’s been made bankrupt. Artists from Marvin Gaye to MC Hammer have filed for bankruptcy, while Sting, Alanis Morissette and Leonard Cohen all lost varying degrees of their fortunes over the years. The list goes on. And it will no doubt grow as musicians focus on what they’re good at – making music – rather than running their financial affairs. But this will provide little succour to Tiger Lily and other members of Hutchence’s family, who are yet to receive anything.
For the time being, the whereabouts of Hutchence’s millions will continue to mystify.
‘Nothing that Hutchence “owned” was technically his. “It was as if he had never existed,” his sister noted’