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Nigella Lawson and Charles Saatchi 'were not told about fraud suspicions' Lawson and Saatchi 'unconcerned until credit card bills reached £76k a month'
(35 minutes later)
Charles Saatchi's accountant has told a court he did not tell his boss and his boss's ex-wife Nigella Lawson his suspicions that their personal assistants were spending thousands of pounds of their money as he did not want to bother them with "trivial matters". Charles Saatchi and Nigella Lawson considered monthly credit card bills of tens of thousands of pounds run up by their assistants to be "trivial matters", with Saatchi becoming concerned only when the sums reached an average of a £76,000 a month, a court has been told.
Rahul Gajjar said he first became aware that the Italian sisters Francesca and Elisabetta Grillo were using credit cards lent to them by the celebrity couple to buys things for themselves at the beginning of last year. Francesca and Elisabetta Grillo, two of five of the couple's assistants to have company credit cards, were averaging bills of £48,000 and £28,000 per month respectively when their spending first began to cause alarm, the art dealer's finance director told a jury at Isleworth crown court.
While Francesca Grillo's average monthly spend was £48,000 and Elisabetta Grillo's was £28,000, the other personal assistants employed by Saatchi spent a maximum of £8,000. The two sisters are accused of spending £685,000 of the celebrity couple's money, which the crown alleges they spent on designer clothes, flights and five star hotels. They deny fraud.
Asked by the prosecutor Jane Carpenter why he did not go to Saatchi and Lawson with his suspicions straight away, Gajjar said: "It was on the back burner. We were dealing with more corporate matters – more serious corporate matters – and Mr Saatchi and Miss Lawson normally didn't have time for what we thought were trivial matters." Rahul Gajjar told the court that he had confronted Francesca Grillo, 35, in July 2012 with a copy of her company credit card bill for the previous month, which ran to 15 pages and totalled more than £64,336.97.
On Wednesday jurors at Isleworth crown court in west London heard that the sisters are alleged to have spent the money on luxury goods and lived the high life as "portrayed in glossy magazines". While some purchases had been on behalf of the Saatchi and Lawson family, he said, Grillo had acknowledged that she had spent more than £34,000 on luxury goods for herself.
Gajjar said both defendants had been given credit cards in Saatchi's Conarco Partnership account with Coutts bank to buy items for the household. These included flights to and from New York costing more than £2,300 each way, luxury hotels in London, Paris, New York and Mallorca, and designer clothes and accessories including a £723 dress from Chloe, a jacket and shoes costing £2,725 from Miu Miu and a Louis Vuitton bag priced £2,300.
While 35-year-old Francesca Grillo's credit limit was £25,000 in June 2008, it went up to £50,000 in February 2010 and rose to £100,000 in June 2011. On a single day, 12 June, he said, Grillo had admitted spending £5,385 in Miu Miu and making two payments of £1,195 and £1,455, a total of more than £8,000.
Gajjar said he had been employed as finance director of Saatchi Gallery Group, part of his Conarco Partnership, since June 2002. Elisabetta Grillo, 41, who, like her sister, had worked for the couple for more than a decade, had admitted spending almost £5,000 on personal items in the same month, Gajjar said, at stores including Harvey Nichols and Liberty. A company taxi account showed 107 personal trips booked by Francesca and 10 by Elisabetta during June 2012.
He told jurors that the couple, who went through a high-profile divorce earlier this year, had a number of personal assistants who worked "flexible" hours for them. Gajjar, now the chief operating officer of the Saatchi Gallery group, said that Francesca Grillo had initially offered to repay the money, texting him after their initial meeting to say she wanted to get "everything back on the right angle".
Asked what their roles were, he told the court: "It could be personal matters, looking after the home. It could be some work-related matters very close to Charles and Nigella." But when she discovered that her membership of the Soho House private members' club, paid for by Lawson, had been cancelled, she had contacted him to say: "If they [Saatchi and Lawson] carry on doing things like this where they bring this very private matter in public, I won't have any other choice but to go to court.
Saatchi and the TV chef broke up after pictures were published in a newspaper showing him holding his wife of 10 years by the throat. "Please try to handle the situation better, because I feel I deal with rebellious teenagers. If one small thing happens before we meet they leave me with no choice but going legal."
The court previously heard that Saatchi alleges that Lawson was so high on drugs that she was unaware of what she had or had not permitted the sisters to spend money on. He said Saatchi and Lawson, who have since divorced acrimoniously, had then offered to allow the women to remain in their employment and living rent free in Lawson's flat in Battersea, but to have their salaries of £28,000 and £25,000 deducted by £1,000 for Francesca and £250 for Elisabetta "until they are satisfied they have been repaid".
The Grillos, both of Kensington Gardens Square, Bayswater, west London, deny the charge against them. Asked by Jane Carpenter, prosecuting, how the sisters had responded to the proposal, Gajjar said: "I remember a reference: 'We're being treated worse than Filipino slaves.' They were absolutely against the proposal."
It is alleged that between 1 January 2008 and 31 December 2012 they committed fraud, abusing their positions as PAs by using a company credit card for personal gain. He said he had prepared a letter inviting the two women to agree to the proposal and admit they had "fraudulently stolen money", but that they had refused to sign it, saying had they done so they would have been tied to the company "for the rest of their lives".
The court heard that the monthly average amount Lawson spent on her credit card was £7,000. Lawyers for Francesca and Elisabetta Grillo have previously argued that their spending had been with the tacit agreement of Lawson, on the understanding that they did not reveal to her then husband that she was a daily user of cocaine, class B drugs and prescription medication.
The sisters are accused of spending more than £685,000 on themselves. The court heard that Francesca Grillo ran up a £64,000 bill in June last year as she went on luxury holidays and bought designer clothes. Saatchi and Lawson are both expected to give evidence in the trial.
Gajjar, 44, told jurors that the defendant made dozens of payments for personal use. The case continues.
Her expenditure included more than £4,700 on flights to New York, where she spent £1,850 at the high-end fashion store Miu Miu and more than £2,000 on hotels.
She also used the card to pay a £1,280 bill at the Ritz hotel in Paris on the same day she bought a Chloe dress for £723.
On 12 June last year she spent £5,385 at Miu Miu London and £2,650 at the designer store Prada.
Gajjar told the court he met the sisters at the Saatchi family home off the King's Road, west London, on 3 July last year to examine their credit card statements.
He said Francesca Grillo explained that some of the transactions were for payments on behalf of her employers, some she was not sure of and others were personal.
"She admitted that they were for her own use, her personal expenditure, which she was slightly apologetic about and vowed to reimburse the company or Charles," Gajjar said.
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