Flash cars, gold bars, superstar entourage ...but what does £3bn James Stunt DO?
Even his own billionaire father-in-law Bernie Ecclestone is baffled by how he made his money
THE only stipulation for snagging an invitation to the frighteningly exclusive Ormeley Dinner is that one should be rich, influential – or, preferably, a combination of the two.
The annual eco-charity shindig, held earlier this month in sumptuous Bridgewater House in the shadow of St James’s Palace, is the pinnacle of every self-respecting planet-hugger’s social calendar.
Hosted jointly by Sting’s wife Trudie Styler, posh conservationists Zac Goldsmith and Damian Aspinall, as well as Ruth Powys – girlfriend of Camilla Parker Bowles’s late brother Mark Shand – it is an unquestionably ritzy affair.
Guests were entertained by Tom Jones and will.i.am, and dined on Sussex goats’ cheese and 28-day aged beef, washed down with a rather pleasing Burgundy.
But while the event at the 19th Century property may have boasted a distinctly old money cast, it was dominated by one guest with decidedly new money connections.
Step forward James Stunt, colourful husband of Petra Ecclestone, the platinum-tressed daughter of billionaire Formula 1 boss Bernie Ecclestone. Art collector and businessman Stunt was determined, it seemed, not to be outdone when it came to some highly conspicuous acts of charitable giving.
Onlookers say that during a fund-raising auction, the 33-yearold self-made man dramatically summoned celebrity auctioneer Charlie Ross to his table before extravagantly joining the bidding on four £25,000 gold ingots – weighing 1kg each – donated by Stunt’s own gold refining company.
In fact, he weighed in with a monster £200,000 offer – but only on condition the underbidder go higher still – then converted his bid into a donation. It was an impressively generous trick he then repeated when he ramped up the bidding for a weekend on a yacht! He also agreed to add £30,000 to top-up the final price for a sculpture.
By the time the evening was over, Stunt, who sponsored the event, was also its most generous giver, having pledged a cool £265,000.
Not, it seems, that he is short of a few bob, particularly if the fleet of five Rolls-Royces – most with private plates bearings his name – which were parked outside to ferry him and his all-male entourage to and from the party, is anything to go by.
Such conspicuous consumption is, needless to say, more than a bit OTT. Fellow guests say Stunt paraded around the whole night in a black coat, cutting a darkly rakish figure. No wonder his father-in-law, Suffolk trawlerman’s son Mr Ecclestone, once famously branded
Stunt a ‘flash b*****d’. Yet with the extravagant behaviour comes a growing list of questions. The Mail on Sunday has learnt that even Mr Ecclestone is now asking how Stunt made all this money.
Nor is that the only puzzle. Why, for example, does a young entrepreneur best known for his dealings in the sedate world of fine art feel the need for such high-level protection wherever he goes?
In London, his multi-million pound cavalcade of limousines is followed around by a presidential-style retinue of bodyguards in a fleet of gleaming Range Rovers. And on visits to California, where he and Petra, now 26, once shared a vast mansion, his minders carry guns.
One close family source told The Mail on Sunday last night: ‘Bernie doesn’t know where the money comes from and James doesn’t say. Bernie knows Stunt does business buying and selling, but he’s never actually met anybody who’s ever heard of James in the art world.’
One thing for sure is that Stunt enjoys a touch of theatre. Take, for example, those gold bars he donated to the charity gala. They were marked Stunt & Co – the name of his recently created gold refining company – and carried what looks like a heraldic family crest, sporting a knight’s helmet and shield with a chevron and three wolves’ heads.
But the coat of arms would appear to be something of, well, a stunt.
‘In my view, this is bogus,’ said Thomas Woodcock, Garter Principal King of Arms, at the College of Arms, after studying the crest.
‘I have not found any arms resembling this shield belonging to a family with a name similar to Stunt.’
Perhaps, on closer inspection, the Roman numerals on the crest’s lavishly etched scrolls are something of a dead giveaway – they bear the date 1982, the year of Stunt’s birth.
While it must be pointed out that he has done nothing illegal, it does rather suggest that Stunt is not short of a healthy dose of chutzpah – or an eye for a lucrative business deal.
Stunt & Co’s website boasts that it offers secure vaulting and transportation of bullion for its rich clients and can even make coins and bars to their own personal designs.
There were more theatricals last month at another fundraiser, the Unicef Halloween Ball in Mayfair. According to one organiser, Stunt indicated to the charity that he was prepared to pay £100,000 out of his own pocket if he was guaranteed to win the award for sporting the evening’s best costume.
He was joking, but it speaks for Stunt’s reputation that people thought he might be serious. In the event, rather than arriving in an elaborate Halloween-themed outfit, Stunt somewhat inexplicably came dressed in a suit and sat at a table with guests who bore an uncanny resemblance to security guards. He had, in fact, told friends he was thinking of appearing as Gatsby.
The organiser points out his ‘offer’ was declined and he did not win.
How odd. But like Gatsby, the bigspending Stunt gives the impression he has created himself from the outside in. And like F. Scott Fitzgerald’s elusive hero, he seems equally difficult to pin down – not least on the question of just how he became so rich so young.
Even by the time he began dating Petra after meeting her on a blind date in London in 2006, Stunt was whizzing around town in flashy Lamborghini. Online estimates – by no means reliable, of course – give his wealth as anything up to a staggering £3.6billion. But even the wily 85-year-old Mr Ecclestone seems at a loss to know exactly how he came about his fortune.
The Ecclestone family source added: ‘Bernie went to James’s office. He said that on the wall there was this painting worth £2million, another worth £1million, another worth half a million.
‘He thought to himself, “What has James ever done to acquire that sort of money?” Bernie doesn’t know anyone who’s sold James anything. His attitude is that if they are genuine and they’re worth that sort of money, good for James. If he’s made the money, fantastic.’ His apparent wealth, lavish donations and fabulous art collections are all the more baffling given his inauspicious start in business. An investigation by The Mail on Sunday reveals he suffered a string of unsuccessful companies before 2011. And financial experts say that, while there’s absolutely no evidence of wrongdoing, some of his complex dealings would appear to be less than orthodox.
To date, his most notable corporate disappointment has been his involvement in Britain’s oldest bookmakers Heathorns, which went out of business in 2009.
Two years previously, Stunt went into business with American betting entrepreneur Thomas Taule in Heathorns, which was established in 1890. But within months of Stunt becoming a director, the company was in trouble.
In August 2007, the firm’s parent company, Interactive Gaming Holdings, run by Taule, had its shares suspended and stopped taking bets after punters demanded their money back. IGH went bust, owing thousands of pounds.
Then, in the summer of 2010, Stunt joined forces with another businessman, Simon Gold, to become directors of a firm called Select Global Management. However, the follow- ing year, they applied to Companies House to have the firm voluntarily struck off.
Stunt and Gold were also jointly briefly involved in another business, London Area Properties, in 2007, before Stunt resigned from the company the following year.
In September 2009, Companies House gave notice of its intention to compulsorily dissolve the firm and it was formally struck off three months later.
The same fate befell another firm the two men became directors of in January 2008, SGA Management. Stunt resigned from the company ten months later, while Gold remained until Companies House again announced its intention to strike it off. It was finally closed down in May 2010. In both cases, it is not known why Companies House made the move to force the firm to shut down.
Last year came a renewed burst of activity, with the creation of four new companies, including Stunt Acquisitions and Stunt & Co. None has yet filed accounts.
Stunt now runs his business affairs from the seventh floor of a luxury building in Curzon Street, Mayfair, once the home of MI5.
Oddly, Stunt & Co, which employs Stunt’s brother Lee as its chief operating officer, increased its share capital to £4.9million by injecting unidentified works of art into the company, even though the company states its business is ‘precious metal production’. The company also took out a mortgage with Barclays – unusual, perhaps, for a billionaire.
Likewise, Stunt Acquisitions, which is also solely owned by Stunt, saw its share capital boosted to
I’ve never courted publicity ‘His career got off to an
inauspicious start’
£3.5million thanks to the apparent injection of other ‘works of art’. None of this explains, however, just how Stunt came by those apparent billions, even if, in one of his earliest deals, he is known to have sold shares in online bookmaker Betfair at a healthy profit.
His comfortable childhood in smart Virginia Water, Surrey, with his publishing director father Geoffrey and mother Lorraine was nowhere near the Ecclestone league.
There are those who have kind words about him. One fellow socialite says: ‘He’s got the kindest of hearts and there’s a good streak in him.
‘He really would help you out if you were in trouble.’
But he concedes that Stunt can be both preposterous and viciously rude.
Alex Tulloch, his friend and vice president of Stunt & Co, also comes to Stunt’s defence. He points to Stunt’s generosity, saying he had made nearly £1million of charitable donations in the past month.
He concedes that Stunt takes as many as 12 security guards with him, saying: ‘There’s no denying he has lots of cars and lots of security, but he needs security.’
Asked about the Stunt & Co gold refining business, he said he expected it to show a turnover of some £100million in its first year.
However, others take a more openly hostile view. ‘James Stunt can be very threatening,’ said one prominent tycoon who wanted to remain anonymous. ‘He makes me nervous.’ In response to enquiries from this newspaper, Mr Stunt’s lawyers issued a statement saying: ‘Mr Stunt is a private person who has never courted publicity nor sought a media profile. Indeed, Mr Stunt goes to considerable lengths to retain his privacy and that of his family.
‘Mr Stunt is a substantial donor to a broad range of charities and an anonymous patron of the arts. At no time has he sought public recognition of his donations.
‘It is a regrettable, inevitable and entirely predictable consequence of The MoS’s actions that Mr Stunt – and like minded donors – will be reluctant to make substantial and much-needed charitable donations in the future for fear of ridicule.’
No doubt he will continue to spend upon himself. With so much money sloshing around, Stunt has indulged a love of Old Masters, investing in a collection which includes leading portrait painters Sir Peter Lely and Sir Godfrey Kneller. During meetings to discuss acquisitions, James is said to sit on a gilded throne in the style of King Tutankhamun.
‘James is a bit of a strange bird,’ an art world source said last week.
‘He has a sort of metal pipe he takes everywhere that I think he has been using to help him quit cigarettes and he carries a bottle of a weak squashtype drink, because he doesn’t like to drink water in restaurants.’
But then, as the thrusting, if mysterious, Mr Stunt knows only too well, if one has the good fortune to be filthy rich, such foibles are no bar to social advancement.