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Hedge fund tycoon abandoned his £80,000 supercar in a pound - because he was 'too busy' to collect it
Last updated at 13:47pm on 21.08.07A hedge fund tycoon who ran up thousands of pounds of motoring fines abandoned his £80,000 supercar in a pound for three months - because he was too busy to collect it.
Bertrand Des Pallieres ran up 65 congestion charge penalties and dozens of parking fines and also drove without road tax.
Transport for London inspectors spent three months trying to track down the Parisian multi-millionaire.
Hanging around: the Maserati Cambiocorsa
When they towed away his Maserati Cambiocorsa from a square in Knightsbridge in May, they were certain he would come forward to pay his fines and collect his car from the pound.
But he ignored all attempts by TfL to contact him and let the fines increase at the rate of £25 a day until the Evening Standard newspaper tracked him down and warned him the car was about to be auctioned.
Mr Des Pallieres, 39, who owns and runs the £170 million SPQR fund, left Deutsche Bank with two colleagues in April to set up his own firm, specialising in complex investments in the debt markets.
He said: "The truth is I was so busy I did not have time to deal with sorting the congestion charges, paying my road tax and getting my car out of the pound.
"I have been setting up a new business and, as you can imagine, it requires all my focus. I have been running around the world raising money for my fund and setting it up. When I left my previous job at Deutsche Bank, I lost my PA. She had always organised all of these domestic things for me. For a while I did not have a PAbut now I have one, so this will get sorted out.
"I can be too focused, which has its pluses and minuses. I am quite obsessive about work. I think here is a clear example where I have perhaps focused on work to the exclusion of everything else."
He added: "Some of my colleagues have teased me about the car. I can understand how people might find this quite strange but it was always my intention to pick it up. I only ever use the car in the summer and this summer I have hardly been in London.
"In my defence, I would say that parking in the TfL car pound is not that expensive relative to the cost of parking in central London."
Mr Des Pallieres had "no idea" his limited edition car was about to be sold. "I did not realise they could auction it," he said. " Obviously, I would be quite upset if it was sold off. It is a lovely car and I do like it, even if I do not use it very often."
A TfL source said the businessman had been their "number one target". The money he owes is thought to be about £5,000. "He had a total of 65 congestion charge fines and lots of parking tickets - and he was driving without tax," said the source.
"We thought he would pay up straight away when his car was seized but he totally ignored us." DVLA enforcement officer Bethan Beasley, who ordered the car to be towed away, said staff were "completely baffledî by the Frenchman's conduct.
"We do clamp quite a lot of high-value cars but normally people come and claim their cars very quickly," he said.
"Normally, we give people 14 days to reclaim their cars, then crush them or auction them. In this case, we were not sure how to sell the car because it was so unusual. We could not understand why he had not got in touch."
