Yes, I do deserve a £200m divorce
She’s got 1,000 pairs of shoes and wants £135k of holidays a year. And, says the woman leaving Laura Ashley boss...
SHE has been called an extravagant shopaholic, a millionairess beauty queen whose extraordinary £220 million divorce claim is being battled out across two hemispheres.
Pauline Chai’s right to have her case heard in Britain, it has been claimed, was so tenuous it rested on the fact that she keeps her mountainous collection of 1,000 pairs of shoes in a Hertfordshire mansion.
Yet the courts have come down on her side, so far at least, ruling that she has made her home in Britain – and that her case can be heard here whatever her critics say.
And now The Mail on Sunday can reveal that Ms Chai has started proceedings to jail her estranged husband for failing to pay maintenance.
Yesterday she spoke for the first time about a divorce that promises to be as angry as it is colourful. She accused her estranged husband of being a ‘penny pinching control freak’, who destroyed her confidence in the course of a long marriage and was violent towards her.
‘I’ve been unfairly portrayed as a silly gold-digger trying to fleece a wealthy guy of his money,’ she says. ‘But all I want is a fair share of the wealth we built up together.
‘The figures bandied around may seem staggering, but I was married to the man for 43 years and bore him five children, whom I pretty much brought up alone.’
Two of those children have severe disabilities. Ms Chai, 68, is seeking half the estimated £440 million fortune built up during the marriage.
Dr Khoo, 74, is chairman of Malaysia United Industries, which owns a stake in Laura Ashley.
Ms Chai claims she played her own small part in helping turn around its fortunes. He is also director of Corus Hotels, which owns ten hotels in Britain.
In October, the High Court ordered Dr Khoo to pay £50,000 per month as an interim payment to his wife – she had asked for £85,000 – yet according to her divorce lawyer Ayesha Vardag, Dr Khoo, 74, has not yet made a payment.
Vardag, who also represented Katrin Radmacher in a landmark 2010 case that opened the door to prenuptial agreements in this country, said: ‘We say Dr Khoo is refusing to pay what the court says he must so as to try to starve his wife into submission. He’s litigating intensely on two continents. It’s all to grind her down.
‘Khoo is thumbing his nose at the English court and we’re going down the road of getting him committed to prison.’
‘He has left me with nothing,’ says Ms Chai. ‘I’ve had to stop medical treatment for my youngest son who is autistic,’ she says. For the past two years the couple have been locked in a war of attrition over where their divorce should be heard.
She wants it in Britain, where she has been living for several years. Here the courts have a history of greater generosity to women than in their native Malaysia, where Dr Khoo believes the case should take place.
On Friday a court froze one of Dr Khoo’s English bank accounts and ordered £145,000 to be transferred to his wife. Mr Justice Bodey urged Dr Khoo to make an open offer to bring the proceedings to an end.
Eyebrows were raised last September when Ms Chai told the courts she needed £135,000 for annual holidays and £85,000 a month to pay for ‘needs’ including first-class flights, hotels and a chauffeur; and that she would normally spend £450 a month on having her hair done.
‘I am being made out to be an extravagant woman but my husband knows I never lived lavishly,’ she says. ‘I don’t buy expensive designer clothing. We had the trappings of wealth, but it all belonged to him and he controlled the purse strings.
‘I am trying to live in something like the way we used to but even more than that I’m trying to see my children – who are all over the world. Two of them cannot manage for themselves. They are the most important thing in my life.’
Ms Chai, a former Miss Malaysia, met and married Dr Khoo in 1970. They have five grown-up children aged between 28 and 43.
The family lived a luxurious globetrotting life, with staffed properties in England, Kuala Lumpur, Australia, and an estate in Canada.
She says one of the reasons they moved around was fear of kidnapping. But in 1998, after the Laura Ashley purchase, they bought a 1,000-acre estate in Hertfordshire estimated to be worth £30 million. It became the family home, complete with an exotic animal menagerie, including alpacas and llamas, and is where Ms Chai is now based.
Despite a seemingly enviable lifestyle that included first-class flights, servants and bodyguards, she says the marriage became oppressive and she was kept on a tight financial leash by her controlling husband.
‘He used money as a weapon to keep me in check. He undermined my confidence, constantly telling me I was stupid and scolded me for not wearing the right clothes,’ she says. Dr Khoo is a collector of cars and travels in a chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce with bodyguards.
‘He always needed to know where we were and who we were with. It seems ridiculous now, but I was so completely dependent on him that I never questioned his edicts.’
She said that once they moved to the UK her husband stopped giving her an allowance, claiming she even needed to ask the housekeeper’s permission to buy food for home.
‘It was humiliating,’ she says. ‘I was told my husband had set a restriction of £100 per week for me to get food for myself and one of our sons.
‘One week we ran out of food and I emailed the housekeeper asking how much I was allowed to get. She replied with a list that included chicken, salmon, broccoli and cauliflower. She refused to reimburse me if I bought something not on the list – such as the special Chinese broth I like.’
She says her husband sometimes made her fly business class while he sat in the first-class cabin.
But she says she is most troubled by the fate of her children, particularly the two who are disabled. ‘I want to take care of them. That is one of the reasons I need to ensure I’m financially independent.’
Although a stay-at-home mother, Ms Chai helped her husband with his business. ‘I believe I had a hand in turning around the fortunes of Laura Ashley,’ she says.
‘I did this for no pay, of course. I was a good wife, and took a lot, but ultimately I had to seek the divorce. He is not the caring and kind man I thought I married.
‘And his nasty, petty behaviour over the past months reassures me I made the right decision.’
He is not the caring man I thought I had married