Jack Vetrianno puts painting on the market (and throws in a flat)
Whoever buys Scottish artist Jack Vettriano OBE’s £2 million flat in Pont Street, Knightsbridge gets not only a one bedroomed flat, but also a painting titled Suddenly Last Summer. (more…)
The Steeple Times asks financier Hugh Warrender: “What’s on your mantelpiece?”
The Steeple Times shares “wit and wisdom”. What’s your guiding force?
I was tempted to put something rude that would be true enough, but there’s a great poem by Rainer Maria Rilke called ‘As Once the Winged Energy of Delight’ (http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/as-once-the-winged-energy-of-delight/) that informs pretty much everything I do or think.
“Don’t get even, get medieval” is, in our humble opinion, a great motto. What’s yours?
If you haven’t tried it, you’ll never know.
Russians in London up their security
Following in the wake of the death of Boris Berezovsky, a number of his friends and acquaintances have stated that they believe he did not commit suicide.
Berezovsky, like many other London based oligarchs, was always surrounded by bodyguards. Both he and his former associate Roman Abramovich were accompanied to court by them last year and on the occasions I saw either man elsewhere, they were never far away either.
Today, as I walked through Knightsbridge’s Lennox Gardens and Belgravia’s Eaton Square, I saw two separate sets of bodyguards accompanying two separate sets of wealthy looking Russians as they walked nervously along.
Though the sight of Russians with protection in the area is not uncommon, today the mood was markedly different. In the past, the bodyguards of the elite were discretion personified. Today, they openly displayed their walkie-talkies and when a passerby got, as they perceived it, too close, they agitatedly shoed them away.
However Mr Berezovsky met his end, the thoughts of the most elite Russians in London must now be: “Who’s next?”
Matthew Steeples reports on the sentencing of Maria Michaela
Today, Maria Michaela was sentenced to 9 years in jail at Harrow crown court for her role as the lynchpin in a fraud of epic proportions.
Termed as “Britain’s biggest female fraudster” by the Evening Standard, Michaela is someone I came across in Lennox Gardens, London. In the building where I lived, she was often spotted with an associate collecting money from a tenant, Stephen Hunter-Scott, also known as Stephen Short, who was jailed alongside her.
In due course this Knightsbridge apartment was repossessed by an Irish bank but the aforementioned associate returned a year later and forcibly took possession. The apartment concerned was eventually taken back and sold on a short lease for just £200,000 recently.
Meanwhile Michaela disappeared but it was not until she appeared on the BBC’s Crimewatch wanted list that she again came to my attention. On the show, it was reported that this woman, who operated under countless aliases that numbered “Joanne Sarah Pier,” “Anjali Sharma,” “Mia Cul” and “Nadia Ali,” had, with the help of a corrupt chartered surveyor named Mary-Jane Rathie, obtained loans of £10.5 million from HBOS and £2.5 million from the Royal Bank of Scotland in 2007 and 2008.
Michaela, who may well in reality be called Bruna Louise, had posed as a wealthy South African heiress to secure the funds she supposedly required to fund the purchase of properties in Chelsea, Belgravia, Pimlico, Greenwich, Clapham, Stoke Newington and the Docklands. In reality, Rathie, who was bribed with £910,000 in cash, a £49,000 Range Rover Sport and a £143,000 Bentley Continental, vastly overvalued each allowing Michaela to pocket, for example, £6 million for a Cheyne Walk house that was in reality worth just £3.5 million.
Whilst Rathie, a former employee of Ashdown Lyons, was jailed for 6 years in July 2011, the fraudster Michaela managed to evade capture for three years. She was eventually caught this January in Bexleyheath working as a mortgage broker. In various preliminary hearings, her pleas of insanity did not help her cause and nor did her unwillingness to provide evidence of her true identity. This morning, she got just what she deserved.
Of her conviction, Detective Inspector Andy Fife of City of London Police commented:
“Maria Michaela created a web of deception that duped banks into handing over vast sums of money and then perpetuated her crimes by assuming a new alias to try and secure more loans. False identities and a corrupt property surveyor were the tools she used to make millions, turning herself into one of the, if not the, most prolific female fraudster the UK has ever seen.”
The lesson of Michaela and her cohorts, I’d argue, is simple. Greed may well be good in the eyes of Gordon Gekko, but the greedy generally get caught in the end and generally it is down to their own vanity. As she rots in her cell, perhaps she ought to consider this folly.
The latest sale of 32a Ovington Square
I first visited 32a Ovington Square in September 2009. At the time, this “hidden house” was the home of Lord Carrington and it had just come on the market at a price, if I recall correctly, of circa £3,000,000.
A friend was looking for somewhere to buy in London and I’d somehow come across the aforementioned property in a magazine. A detached house in Knightsbridge at this price seemed like a bargain and as he was keen to take a look and I lived round the corner, we arranged to see it together.
During this period, I had unfortunately made the mistake of making the acquaintance of a former ambassador’s wife who thought herself rather grand. Said woman somehow found out about my friend going to what Americans might term an “open house” at 32a Ovington Square and somehow muscled in. This individual happened to be selling her own home nearby and I reckon she, like my friend, thought she’d be onto a bargain. She’d previously unsuccessfully tried to persuade my friend to buy her individually styled, Ralph Lauren wallpapered home but as it actually rattled every time an underground train went underneath and as it was far from a bargain, he’d sensibly declined.
We arrived at the 2,240 square foot 32a Ovington Square to be told by a rather unhelpful estate agent that we’d have to just wander round by ourselves and that there was no brochure or floor plan. As a merry throng trailed through the house, Lord Carrington stood in the garden looking bemused and his secretary fussed around him. The pair plainly weren’t comfortable with all the interlopers and all in all, who could blame them.
The ex-ambassador’s wife, whose carelessness Rupert Everett most amusingly made reference to in his recent memoirs, spent the entire visit whingeing about the house being dark and stinking of damp. I had to agree with her as the neighbouring buildings towered over it and there was mould on the walls. My friend simply said: “It needs a fortune spending on it.” We left and later I heard that it sold for well above the asking price. The wife of the ex-ambassador thankfully departed from our lives soon after.
About a year and a half later, I saw 32a Ovington Square for sale with planning permission to construct a far larger residence with a basement and sub-basement pool complex. The price was in the order of £14,000,000. I thought that somewhat ludicrous but now that the very same property is on the market at a price of £23,00,000, it seems that the world has just gone mad.
The brochure for the new residence, which has been renamed, Carrington House, reveals a three-storey low-built freehold building with 5,300 square foot of accommodation. Though 32a Ovington Square has been more than doubled in size by a developer named London City Developments, the sub-basement leisure complex has not been constructed. Could this have been because of planning problems or simply because such construction wasn’t deemed to add value?
In August 2002, Lord Carrington, whom The Mirror described as being “doddery” in a Scurra diary piece, was said to have objected to a bar named Townhouse behind his former home being given a 1am licence. That bar has since closed but as seven of the residents of Ovington Square and Beauchamp Place also took a dislike to the prospect of subterranean developments at his former home, only proposals for a single basement level were included in the January 2010 plans submitted by a Mr & Mrs R. Garner.
Aside from controversy with residents and planning officials, this “heavily overlooked,” “dark” house gets a brief credit in Jeffrey Archer’s 1984 novel, First Among Equals:
“Charles would not have normally accepted the invitation. Lately he found cocktail parties to consist of nothing but silly little bits of food, never being able to get the right drink and rarely enjoying the trivial conversation. But when he glanced on his mantelpiece and saw an ‘At Home’ from Lady Carrington he felt it might be an amusing break from the routine he had fallen into since Fiona left. He was keen to discover more about the rumoured squabbles in Cabinet over expenditure cuts. He checked his tie in the mirror, removed an umbrella from the hat stand and left Eaton Square for Ovington Square… He arrived at Lord Carrington’s front door a little after six forty-five. A maid answered his knock, and he walked straight through to a drawing room that could have held fifty guests and very nearly did. He even managed to be served with the right blend of whiskey before joining his colleagues from both the Upper and Lower Houses.”
Turning to the real Lord Carrington, here is a man who has led a remarkable life. He served as Foreign Secretary in Margaret Thatcher’s cabinet between 1979 and 1982 and as Secretary General of NATO from 1984 to 1988. The last surviving member of the Cabinets of both Harold Macmillan and Sir Alec Douglas-Home was British High Commissioner in Australia between 1956 and 1959 and also chaired the 1979 Lancaster House conference that brought Zimbabwe’s revolutionary war to an end. In 1991, Carrington presided over diplomatic talks in the former Yugoslavia and commented:
“When I first talked to Presidents Milošević and Tudjman, it was quite clear that both of them had a solution which was mutually satisfactory – which was that they were going to carve up Bosnia between them.”
Milošević was found dead in his cell in 2006 but it is quite possible that Lord Carrington’s name will be mentioned in the trial of Goran Hadzic at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia that has just commenced at The Hague. It is amazing to think that matters involving this 93-year old politician are still current but Carrington’s stamina is shown in his roles as the longest serving member of the House of Lords and the second longest serving member of the Privy Council after HRH The Duke of Edinburgh.
Aside from politics, there is much on the internet, a considerable amount of it written by wildcards and fantasists whose number includes David Icke, about Carrington’s involvement with Henry Kissinger, the Illuminati, the Bilderberg Group and the Committee of 300. The consensus of these conspiracy theorists generally borders on the ludicrous, but it is without doubt that Lord Carrington had and continues to have influence in many high places. He was chairman of Christie’s International PLC from 1988 to 1993 and has held directorships on the boards of companies that have included Barclays Banks PLC, Hambros PLC, Cadbury Schweppes PLC, Amalgamated Metal Corporation PLC, British Metal Corpoation PLC, Rio Tinto PLC, Kissinger Associates Inc. and Hollinger Inc.
Following on from this rather over the top redevelopment, a new chapter has certainly begun at 32a Ovington Square. Whether it is bought by a popstar or a Russian oligarch, they’ll definitely not be anywhere nearly as equal to Lord Carrington in terms of their league of influence.
Carrington House, 32a Ovington Square, London, SW3 1LR is for sale through Knight Frank. For further information contact Nick Vestey on +44 (0) 20 7591 8600. Full details of the house can be viewed at: http://search.knightfrank.com/sla100211
For more details about the Carrington family’s Carrington Estates Ltd., go to: http://www.carington.co.uk/
This stylish Anglo-Italian entrepreneur was one of the founders of Quintessentially. Charm personified, Del Bono now assists wealthy foreigners invest in London’s finest homes and businesses. His most talked about venture is a £100 million project that will turn 50 St James’s Street into a member’s club, spa and hotel. In the residential sector, he represented a Ukranian who purchased Hanover Lodge in Regent’s Park for £120 million: Britain’s most expensive single family residence. His is a Rolodex that is second to none.
He’s shunned Facebook and Twitter and is often to be found in the V&A library at weekends. Some say Carokis is developing an intellectual side but his day job is more typically Greek. This diplomat’s son works in shipping and is especially talented at making Greek salads. His costume choices for fancy dress parties are anything other than conservative.
This Old Etonian describes himself on Twitter as an optimist, libertarian and cyclist. Warrender co-founded the Knightsbridge School and has been involved in wealth management and investment banking for several decades. He claims the new club he raised funds for in Mayfair will “put the heart” back into Hertford Street. With him and Robin Birley at the helm, no one is doubting it.
This Geordie Vegan campaigner got some £24 million in her divorce from Sir Paul McCartney. She’s continued to cause trouble ever since.
