A new legal battle is brewing that has it all: British aristocrats, an heir who hangs with the royal family, and dueling charges flying between top money managers on two continents, both claiming to be bilked by the opposing bilker.
The players are ripped from a Hollywood screenplay: a well-connected British family office versus the star private equity firm it funded and controlled. The former PE team comprises three executives now embroiled in a court battle who, until April, successfully purchased, and subsequently sold while booking strong profits, sundry small companies in one of the industry’s hottest areas, “direct” investments. The adversaries who fired them are the investment chiefs for the Landon family, one of the U.K.’s wealthiest and most storied clans. Its late, swashbuckling patriarch, Timothy Landon, won the nickname “the latter-day Lawrence of Arabia,” and his son, Arthur, is a fixture in the London tabloids as a mover in the highest reaches of British society and a great friend of Princes William and Harry—Arthur even threw Harry’s renowned pre-wedding stag party at the Landons’ 44,000-acre estate.
The two sides are trading fire in dueling lawsuits. The first shot was fired on June 11, in the Court of Chancery of the State of Delaware. It’s the Landon family office action versus the private equity managers. The plaintiff is Landon Capital Partners, LLC. It details that the firm “was founded in 2015 and services JPS Finance Ltd. (JPS), a limited liability company … that manages assets for a single family (the ‘Investor’).” Although the family isn’t named, it’s widely known that JPS—the initials are those of its departed, long-tenured manager—is the family office for the Landons.
The three defendants are Christopher Sullivan, the “managing partner of LCP [Landon Capital Partners]” and a member of the “board of managers of LCP (the ‘Board’),” James Kennedy, “LCP’s Managing Director,” and Robert McMenimon, “LCP’s Director of Operations.”
The dispute is complicated (more on that below) but boils down to this: The Landon family office is arguing, according to court filings, that the managers secretly solicited deals for a new firm they were starting, and basically left the family office high and dry as LCP’s owners. The family office states in the complaint that by late 2023, the relationship between the PE and family office advisors had soured, according to the plaintiff. “Defendants grew frustrated with LCP’s financing restrictions and reduced investment activity because LCP generated fewer direct fees to them as a result,” says the filing. “In March of 2024,” the complaint continues, “Sullivan declared without warning in a series of emails that he, Kennedy, and McMenimon planned to leave LCP to launch a new private equity firm (‘NewCo.’) in a matter of days. “Defendants offered to continue to manage LCP Portfolio Companies while simultaneously launching NewCo., demanding additional economic and structural incentives including $3 million in operational funding for Defendants’ salaries” [among other items]. LCP terminated Sullivan for Cause on April 17, 2024, pursuant to … the Employment Agreement,” says the complaint. “On the same day,” it continues, “LCP terminated Kennedy and McMenimon for their breaches of fiduciary duty, dishonesty, and related misconduct.”
Sullivan, meanwhile, tells a very different story. On the morning of Aug. 5, LCP’s former chief manager shot back. As plaintiff, he filed a 9-page “Answer to Verified Complaint and Verified Counterclaims” in the Delaware Court of Chancery. He named LCP, Rupert Edis, and Scott Jenkins [the two top Landon family office executives] as defendants. He charges that “LCP, through Rupert Edis and Scott Jenkins, wrongfully terminated [his] employment on a ‘for cause’ basis without sufficient legal and factual justification so that Edis and Jenkins could further personally enrich themselves at the expense of the Landon Family Trust.” The complaint states that Sullivan spent “thousands of hours building LCP’s portfolio.” It goes on to claim, ”By contrast, Edis never played an active role in cultivating LCP’s investments; however, Edis has largely used it as a vehicle to personally benefit himself.”
Edis is an intriguing figure, having taken the top job at the Landon Trust when the original head retired. The only known article about Edis: an early 2023 profile that appeared in Campden FB, a family office press site. The highly positive piece relayed that Edis is the son of a prominent British diplomat, and grew up in Portugal, Mozambique, the U.S., and Northern Ireland. Edis attended English boarding schools and graduated from Cambridge, then worked at the prestigious law firm Linklaters, specializing in asset-backed finance. The family office also runs ELV, the family’s large real estate development arm in the U.S. The Campden story says that ELV currently holds a half-a-billion-dollar portfolio of properties stateside.
In the article, Edis talked about the long-horizon approach of his old-school, aristocratic coinvestors: “One of our coinvesting families told me that quarterly reporting for them means every 25 years instead of every three months as in the corporate world … because they’ve been living on the same land for centuries.”
The Landon family’s roots run deep
The legal feud in Delaware is shining a spotlight on one of Europe’s most mythologized families who, despite the tabloids’ pursuit of son Arthur, has always been highly secretive. Born in Vancouver to a British brigadier general father and Canadian mother, Timothy Landon attended the Sandhurst royal military academy, where he reportedly became friendly with, or at least encountered, fellow cadet Qaboos bin Said al-Said, the crown prince of the sultanate of Oman, then a U.K. protectorate. In the mid-1960s, British soldiers were fighting a local Marxist rebel force, trained and armed by the Soviet Union, battling to establish an independent state and expand the pan-Arab movement aimed at ending British influence in the Middle East.
London was bent on overcoming the rebellion to protect its power in the region. Besides, a defeat for the old sultan could give Moscow control over, or the power to threaten, the Strait of Hormuz off Oman’s northern coast, potentially squeezing the flow of oil that was the lifeblood of the U.K.’s economic life and indeed crucial to economics across Europe.
Among the “10th Hussars” dispatched to Oman was junior intelligence officer Timothy Landon. At the time, Oman was a primitively agrarian, ultratraditional, isolationist state where slavery was legal. Qaboos’s father, Sultan Said bin Taimur, held to the old ways and resisted all reform and technological development. When Qaboos championed modernization, the sultan threw his son under house arrest. But the British reckoned that the old man’s reactionary stance strengthened the rebels’ position, and sought to oust Taimur and install his progressive, British-educated son. According to published reports, Landon’s commanding officer persuaded Taimur to allow Landon, Qaboos’s old acquaintance from Sandhurst, to pay visits to the prince that would brighten his dreary imprisonment.
Landon, then 27, reportedly helped persuade Qaboos to overthrow his father. In July of 1970, Qaboos confronted the sultan at the royal palace in Muscat. Taimur surrendered in an almost bloodless coup—almost, because the potentate mishandled his firearm and shot himself in the foot. Before he died two years later while living in exile at London’s Dorchester hotel, Taimur was asked to name his greatest regret. “Not having Landon shot!” snapped the deposed ruler.
Over the next decade and a half, Landon served as Qaboos’s aide-de-camp, helping the sultan defeat the Communist insurgency then build one of the Middle East’s strongest military forces. Oman—which had just started commercial petroleum production three years before the coup—also emerged as a potent oil export machine. According to press accounts, Qaboos rewarded his friend via commissions on the nation’s trade in crude, arms, and agriculture, and Landon achieved renown brokering deals for rulers across the Middle East. Besides the comparisons to T.E. Lawrence, Landon, through these adventures, earned a second handle: the White Sultan.
Around 1980, Landon returned to Britain, but flew frequently to Muscat to sustain his business interests. The tycoon intensely protected his privacy. Only one photo of Landon is known to exist, a black and white taken in Oman, picturing the young soldier sporting a tribal headdress. To avoid notice, he commuted to his London offices in a black taxi repurposed as a passenger car. In the late ’70s, Landon purchased the Faccombe Estate, an entire hamlet on the Hampshire-Berkshire border covering seven square miles and featuring a mid-19th-century church, its own inn-and-pub, and 35 homes for tenant farmers. Landon prided himself on pioneering a zero-carbon footprint. One of Europe’s earliest commercial windmills powers the homes. Faccombe plays host to 1,500 ewe lambs. The estate’s online description notes that management offsets the animals’ carbon footprint by planting vast areas of stubble turnips as ground cover. The family’s land holdings also encompass historic grouse moors in northern England and Scotland.
To the end, Timothy Landon maintained strong ties with Qaboos. According to several press accounts, the sultan each year sent his friend a birthday gift of 1 million euros. Landon responded with such gestures as, legend has it, smuggling from Sweden a Bofors cannon, normally for military use, that the sultan mounted on his yacht.
When Landon died of lung cancer in 2007, newspaper stories speculated that his fortune outstripped that of Queen Elizabeth. During his funeral at Faccombe, six estate workers attired in Landon’s personal tweeds carried his coffin.
A younger generation of Landons takes over
Arthur Landon is the only child of Timothy and his wife, Princess Katalina Marie Esterhazy de Galantha, a member of the Hungarian aristocracy. His mom is still living, and like Arthur a beneficiary of the family trust. Born in 1981, Arthur studied film at Bristol University, and has pursued a career as a screenwriter and director. The handsome chap has also dabbled as a fashion model. He’s always mentioned in the frequent lists of Prince Harry’s best friends that run in the British newspapers. Arthur accompanied Harry on a notorious trip to Las Vegas in 2012, when the prince was secretly photographed half naked, and the public got a gander when the clandestine shutterbug leaked the shots to the tabloids.
Harry reportedly met his girlfriend Cressida Bonas at the Faccombe Estate the same year. And in 2018, Arthur hosted Harry’s bachelor party at Faccombe. In his memoir, Spare, the prince describes a weekend of riotous fun, recounting that Arthur outfitted the indoor tennis court with a mechanical bull and bows and arrows Lord of the Rings style. According to a person interviewed by Fortune who knows Arthur: “He’s a great guy whose love is film, and he isn’t involved in the family businesses.”
In an email to Fortune, Edis stated: “As detailed in LCP’s complaint, the defendants’ dishonesty and misconduct is evidenced by their covert attempt to launch a new private equity firm, recruit LCP employees, and the usurpation of LCP’s investment opportunities. These represent flagrant breaches of fiduciary duties and, in Mr. Sullivan’s case, misconduct that breached numerous provisions of his employment agreement.
“The counterclaim submitted by the defendants on August 5th 2024 is rejected by LCP in its entirety and contains a litany of inaccurate, entirely baseless, and defamatory statements in an attempt to damage the reputation of LCP. The allegations are vague and clearly retaliatory and intended to distract from LCP’s allegations of Mr. Sullivan’s wrongdoing. LCP’s focus remains as ever on its current investments and valued investors.”
In his counterclaim, Sullivan states that a year after LCP was founded, “Edis had no carried interest participation. Instead, the carried interest was split between the Landon Family (67%) and LCP employees (33%).” That arrangement changed in 2019, according to the filing, when “Edis commissioned a compensation expert, Nigel Mills, to conduct a study and present results to the Advisors [the board governing the trust]. Ultimately, the advisors—all appointed by Edis—approved a new carried interest split whereby the Landon Trust received 33%, Edis received 30%, and Jeremy Menell [the Landon family office CFO] received 7%.” Sullivan alleges, “As a result, Edis has amassed $13 million in carried interest from LCP’s investments, all while the Landon Family members—the rightful beneficiaries of the Landon Trust—have continued to receive only their annual stipend.”
Sullivan further asserts: “By improperly terminating Sullivan and the LCP team ‘for Cause,’ Edis has attempted to seize control over a significant portion of the LCP team’s carried interest—which could be upwards of $38 million.”
The plaintiff avows that his team presented a plan to the trust advisors where “the LCP Team would form a NewCo. and enter into a multiyear Management Services Agreement with LCP to manage the successful sale of the 14 portfolio companies.” According to Sullivan, the deal gave the trust the right to “invest fee-free, carry-free in perpetuity for up to 40% of new capital in the new entity’s transactions.” Sullivan states that the proposal was “better for the Trust but worse for Edis,” adding that “for every dollar in carried interest LCP generated, Edis—who contributed little time or value to the LCP portfolio companies—took 30 cents on that dollar.”
In the counterclaim allegations, Sullivan charges that “the counterclaim defendants breached the employment agreement by purporting to terminate [Sullivan] ‘For Cause.’” He also asks the court to require that Edis and Jenkins “disgorge carried interest retained in light of [Sullivan’s] wrongful termination.” Sullivan seeks “damages on account of the counterclaim defendant’s breach of [his] employment agreement” and rights to unpaid and future carried interest payments on the LCP portfolio.
In an email to Fortune, Sullivan said that he “declined to comment beyond what is stated in my complaint.”
It will be fascinating to watch how this latest chapter in the remarkable Landon saga plays out, this time not in the deserts of Oman or on the grounds of Faccombe but, of all places, in a Delaware courtroom.
