When Britain's biggest private house, a mega-mansion called Witanhurst on Highgate Hill in north London , went on the market in 2008, it was close to a ruin.
His name was Andrey Guriev. Over the next decade or so, the Russian fertiliser billionaire presided over a massive renovation, which - at its peak - involved an army of decorators, plumbers, carpenters and landscape gardeners burning through £2million a week. But the most ambitious element of the project was the construction of what is reputed to be the biggest basement ever built in London.
Alexander Gorbachev , a former director of Guriev's company PhosAgro, is suing him for £2.7billion: the 25 per cent stake in PhosAgro that he claims he is entitled to, plus the value of the dividends he has missed out on since the company was floated in 2011. Not a bad capital appreciation for a property that was built in 1913 by the Liberal MP and soap magnate Sir Arthur Crosfield on an 11-acre plot for £1million .
The renovation of Witanhurst, including this proposed bathroom design, involved an army of decorators, plumbers, carpenters and landscape gardeners burning through £2million a week In the course of researching my biography of Chelsea FC's former owner Roman Abramovich 20 years ago, I discovered that, when he and his business partner Boris Berezovsky acquired the oil giant Sibneft, they did so with nothing in writing to say how the shares were to be divided.
Their dispute spilled over into the UK courts in 2012 when, after the biggest private litigation battle in British history, a judge threw out Berezovsky's claim that the two had an 'oral agreement' that they were equal partners. When Guriev tried to fob him off by offering to buy him out for $30million, Gorbachev angrily refused the offer.
Gorbachev is not the first disgruntled PhosAgro employee to seek satisfaction via the British courts. Sychev also claimed his car was sabotaged three times in an attempt to kill him. 'The cars were new and expensive Jeeps and in the first case everything happened quickly at high speed on the highway. Igor Sychev claims he became the subject of 'assassination attempts' by Putin cronies and his enemies 'threatened to murder his wife and children'
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