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.
