A legal dispute over businesses worth hundreds of millions of pounds that has torn apart one of London’s wealthiest but most secretive families has finally reached the High Court.
The Salem family, from Beirut in Lebanon, has been split for decades by a row over who is entitled to the profits from a London-based trading empire that operates mainly in west Africa and includes the rights to BAT cigarette imports in Nigeria.
Moussy Salem, 54, a grandson of the founder of the business, claims his late father and his descendants were wrongly cut out of his share of the proceeds by Moussy’s uncles Freddy and Beno Salem. The claims are strongly denied by Freddy and Beno. Freddy Salem, 82, has amassed a property empire including a row of buildings in Mount Street, Mayfair, that takes in celebrity restaurant Scott’s, the Christian Louboutin shoe store and high end jewellers Pragnell.
He and his wife Muriel have one of Europe’s most important private collections of modern art, the Crawford Collection, with over 700 works by artists such as Bridget Riley, Damien Hirst and Carla Accardi.
It is housed in their Regent’s Park mansion with viewing by appointment. The current legal dispute, which began in 2015, came before Deputy Master Bowles sitting at the Rolls Building at the High Court at a private hearing last Friday. Moussy’s father Raymond, who died in 2002, was one of four brothers.
The brothers’ father originally ran a money-changing business in Beirut, started in the 1930s, which his offspring joined before branching out in the 1970s into providing finance for textile traders in Nigeria.
Their connections in that country spawned a business supplying cigarettes there. After war broke out in Lebanon, the brothers fled to the UK in 1975 and diversified into property. Despite being based in London, Nigeria, Benin, Togo and Ghana, their companies are owned through a complex array of trusts in offshore tax-free destinations such as Panama and Guernsey.
A first attempt to split the business, in the Nineties, was brokered by billionaire banker Edmond Safra, who died in a bizarre arson attack by one of his nurses at his Monaco penthouse.
