Tonight:
5°c
Revealed: Extravagant lifestyle of businessman at centre of £400m divorce battle
Felix Allen7 Sep 2009
The extravagant lifestyle of a businessman at the centre of a £400 million divorce battle was revealed today as the case heads for the High Court.
Scot Young, who claims he is penniless after losing his vast fortune, faces jail if he cannot account for the missing money at a hearing today.
Speaking before the case, his estranged wife Michelle told how Mr Young used to shower her with expensive gifts, spent £1 million a year on clothes for himself and bought a new luxury car every six weeks.
The property tycoon, 48, owned some of England's finest houses and a yacht in Monaco and travelled the world on Concorde or private jet.
Mr Young, who is close friends with Topshop boss Sir Philip Green and billionaire oligarch Boris Berezovsky, told an earlier court hearing he has lost every penny of his former wealth and was given until today to produce documents.
But Mrs Young warned she is determined to prove he is hiding some of his fortune and has hired a team of experts to gather evidence.
The former model, 45, said she used to get her weekly food shopping delivered from Harrods to the £21 million Oxfordshire mansion where the family lived until the marriage broke down in 2006.
Mrs Young said: “There was really no limit to what I could spend. I could have anything I wanted. I never had fewer than three luxury cars, including a Hummer just to take my dogs to the vet.”
Once, she said, her husband bought her a Range Rover filled with tens of thousands of pounds worth of couture dresses by designer Maria Grachvogel.
For her 40th birthday, he lavished her with £1 million worth of Graff diamond jewellery. For Christmas he bought her a Damian Hirst sketch.
The couple filled their home with £4 million of antique furniture and their two daughters, Scarlet, now 16, and Sasha, 14, had Arabian horses to ride on their 200-acre estate.
She added: “He wasn't one for throwing glitzy parties, but he was extravagant and generous.
“He loved Dolce & Gabbana clothes and every time their new collection came out he would buy it all, spending around a £1million a year on clothes for himself.
“Every time he pulled off a deal he bought a fabulously expensive watch – he must have had more than 200. He had countless luxury cars, sometimes buying a new one every six weeks.”
These days Mrs Young shops at Morrisons and she and her two daughters face eviction from their rented London home after their property was repossessed and accounts emptied.
“I want Scot to know that I am not going to roll over. I mean business,” Mrs Young said.
“Last week he told Scarlet he would buy her a Rolls-Royce Phantom for her 17th birthday. He said he was on the verge of a deal involving Bill Clinton that would make him one of the richest men in the world.
“It is bewildering for the girls. He asked one of them last week to come to live with him in his new luxury apartment, which doesn't exactly chime with the idea that he has lost everything. In truth, we simply don't know how he has been living for the past three years.”
She also revealed he told her he had lost all his money in a doomed £2 billion shopping development in Russia dubbed Project Moscow -- “but I simply didn't believe him”. She later found evidence of his wealth on a laptop, she claimed.
Reader views (3)
Has she ever thought that maybe she spent him into the poor house!?
he sounds like a clever man to me. Hide the assets away from the Money Grabbing ex wife. Marriage (if it does unfortunately come to an end) should be a simple affair, if there is no pre-nup agreement (not legal in the UK anyway) then it should be a simple case of each person leaves the relationship with what they came into it with. Anything gained by either party, in the name of gifts, should be kept and any joint assets split evenly. 50/50.
THIS to me sounds like one of those all too common cases of "oh I let him deal with the finances"
MORE FOOL YOU WOMAN.
MORE FOOL YOU!
- Alan, London, 07/09/2009 14:51
Report abuse
They sound like utterly ghastly people. For richer, for poorer, they should stay together. They deserve one another.
- Maximum Bob, London UK, 07/09/2009 12:19
Report abuse
What vulger horrible people.
- David, London, 07/09/2009 11:51
Report abuse
