The ghost of a murdered spy was raised today in the ongoing Holyoake v Candy trial at the Rolls Building in London.
Businessman Mark Holyoake is suing brothers Nick and Christian Candy for more than £100m, claiming they “coerced” him out of millions of pounds after Christian Candy’s company CPC lent him £12m to buy Belgravia Mansion Grosvenor Gardens House in late 2011.
He is also suing CPC and various CPC executives at the time of the loan, including then head of tax and corporate finance, Steven Smith.
The Candy brothers strongly refute the allegations and say that Holyoake was an unreliable creditor who lied to them from the start. They say that Holyoake’s allegations of coercion are fabricated.
Speaking under cross examination from Holyoake’s barrister, Roger Stewart QC, Smith denied that he was aware that Christian Candy had been looking into employing “illegitimate debt collectors” to coerce Holyoke into paying.
Before being questioned about the collectors, Stewart asked Smith about his links to Alexander Litvinenko, the former Russian spy who was murdered in London in 2006.
At the time of the murder Smith was a director of Risk, a private detective agency that had paid both Litvinenko and his alleged killer Andrei Lugovoy.
He said that he had no personal dealings with either of them, but the day after the spy’s death Smith came to the offices of Risk for a board meeting to discover “the upper floor was cordoned off with yellow and black radioactive tape, because Litvinenko had been in there”.
“The boardroom was radioactive,” he said.
On the subject of debt collectors, Stewart asked if he was aware that Christian Candy intended to sell the Hollyoake loan.
Smith said that he was regularly contacted by companies seeking to buy debt, and CPC had sold a Kaupthing debt to Deutsche Bank for 30 cent in the dollar. However, he said he wasn’t aware that CPC had attempted to specifically market the Holyoake loan.
Under cross examination, he said he wasn’t aware that Christian Candy had hired a private investigator to help him find a buyer for the Holyoake loan.
“You were fully aware that the defendants were contemplating using illegitimate debt collectors,” Stewart said.
“No,” he said.
Smith said that he used a private investigator called Cliff Kunckey to do a criminal record check on Holyoake for CPC.
Smith also said that CPC used Risk to do “Know Your Customer”, or KYC, checks on potential buyers of apartments in 1 Hyde Park “to make sure they were the sort of people you could sell to”.
“In theory, there was no need to do it as the money [for the apartments] came through lawyers, and it was for them to do KYC checks, but we had heightened KYC checks,” he said.
Smith said he was not working at CPC in November 2011 when the Holyoake loan was made as he was in hospital recovering from seriously injuries. He sustained the injuries escaping from armed robbers who burst into his villa in the south of France.
The hearing is now in its fifth week, and is scheduled to last four more.
