Going for a song
As one residential property door closes, another one opens. Later this week, the Kingstone Lisle Park estate owned by the hedge fund manager Jamie Lonsdale will go on the market through Knight Frank for £35m.
The 50-something financier, a scion of the Kleinwort Benson Lonsdale dynasty, has a more interesting reason than most for selling up. Post-divorce, Lonsdale has decided it’s time to pursue his dream of being an opera singer, and is selling off the Oxfordshire holding to fund his entrée into London’s musical salons.
Going for a song, as they say. “I only feel complete when I am singing,” trills Lonsdale, whose dream role is Jean Valjean in Les Miserables.
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There are hands-on approaches to overseeing a lingerie business and then there is Theo Paphitis.
The entrepreneur, currently running the underwear retailer Boux Avenue, says it would be his “pleasure” to give those Virgin Trains staff unhappy about their see-through uniforms “a suitable bra of my choice”.
When Diary called for clarification, Paphitis’s spinners backtracked: “The customer’s choice [of bra], his recommendation.” That’s still too hands-on for Diary’s tastes.
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Pidgley points to 'politics of envy'
The Candy brothers have received their fair share of criticism for the oligarchs’ pleasure-dome development in London’s Knightsbridge, One Hyde Park.
Indeed, some of the “nasty stuff” has stung so much that Nick Candy has been rather upset. “I’m an emotional guy, I wear my heart on my sleeve,” Candy told the trade magazine Property Week in an interview he “didn’t want to do”.
So it’s over to Berkeley Group founder Tony Pidgley, who sat in on the same grilling, to set the record straight. “There’s a lot of envy and misunderstanding when it comes to Nick and Christian,” says the housebuilder, who believes that One Hyde Park has “lifted the British housing market ... all the way down the line”.
After Pidgley turned the project down, of course. “I could have bought the site,” he claims. “But I didn’t have the vision.”
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Still on Nick Candy, no-one can accuse him of not paying attention to detail - in fact, the diagnosis “OCD” seems fair. The property developer carries out weekly inspections of the One Hyde Park flats, when he has to make sure that the hangers in the wardrobes are facing the same way and are “ordered in the colours of the rainbow”. Not even the fridges are a chill-out zone. “I like everything to be facing forward,” he reveals. “It’s a bit of an issue.”
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'Fair play' for tax loopholes
Diary’s tale of the family connections in the Cayman islands last week has ruffled some offshore feathers.
Following my story that Cayman spokesman Ingrid Ugland is the daughter of Andreas Ugland, the namesake of the Ugland House building that president Obama described as “either the biggest building or the biggest tax scam in the world”, one mole turns the spotlight on an even bigger shadow banking scandal.
That’s 1208 North Orange Street in Wilmington, Delaware, says the source, who claims they were moved to point out that the address is host to 285,000 separate businesses “in the interests of fair play”.
harriet.dennys@telegraph.co.uk
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