They teamed up in the 1960s to turn old boarding houses into hotels and moved into breweries and casinos, marking the beginning of their business empire. Their holdings include delivery service Yodel and online retailer The Very Group.

Previously practically inseparable, the twins became increasingly estranged over the years. The family was divided over the sale of the Ritz, which the identical twins bought for £75 million in 1995.

The gilded hotel became the subject of tabloid fodder in 2020 when one of David’s sons, Alistair Barclay, was alleged to have installed a listening device in the conservatory to tape a private conversation between Frederick and his daughter, Amanda, about the sale of the hotel. Frederick, in turn, got hotel security to install a hidden camera that captured the bugging incident.

The publicity-shy brothers paid £800,000 to settle the suit, but the incident laid bare the division over the separation of their business empire, a split that Fredrick called the “greatest mistake of my life.” So estranged were the two men that they literally came to blows on a luxury yacht, Frederick’s wife, Hiroko Barclay, said in court testimony this week.

Last year, Frederick Barclay was ordered to pay Hiroko – his partner of 34 years – £100 million as part their divorce. The payout ranks among the highest to be made public by UK courts, where large settlements between the rich and famous are generally hashed out behind closed doors.

But Barclay failed to hand over the money, saying he didn’t have the funds, according to his ex-wife. Judge Cohen told the tycoon last year he had three months to pay half the divorce payment. His former spouse accused him of trying “to string things out” and hide “behind a web of complex structures,” until either she or Frederick died.

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Barclay is the principal beneficiary of a trust that receives funds from loan notes worth £545 million, lawyers for Hiroko said.

For years, the twins lived in a mock-Gothic castle on a private piece of land off the northern coast of France, one of the group of self-governing Channel Islands that rely on Britain for its defence. The islands have long been a magnet for the rich thanks to their low tax regimes and opaque corporate structures

David Barclay is buried on the island, which the twins first acquired in 1993.

“It’s quite isolated,” Hiroko said during testimony. “May to October is beautiful.”

Bloomberg

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