A judge found that Christina Haynes was promised half of an £18million home, but that the promise was part of an “elaborate performance” that did not provide legal rights
A multi-millionaire’s ex who claimed she was promised half their £18m family house during “lunch on a snowcapped mountain” has lost a court battle to claim the expensive prize.
A judge found that Christina Haynes was promised the home during an “elaborate performance” to keep her happy when her ex, millionaire Mark Austin, failed to marry her. High Court Judge Joanne Wicks KC ruled that, while it might be considered “a cruelty” the promise was “insufficient to give her legal rights” to the property.
Christina, then 20, was less than half her 46-year-old multimillionaire boyfriend Mark Austin’s age when they met in 2000 and began what she called a “blissfully happy” relationship, during which they had two kids. She gave up her job and the couple set up home in a west London mansion now worth £18m, but, by 2018 they had split up, and Mr Austin, now 71, agreed to pay a still sizeable but less substantial £2.75 million sum to his 45-year-old furniture designer ex to buy a new house for her and the kids.
But he did not pay and she went back to court, claiming that she had in fact been promised half of their former home when Mr Austin took her to a lunch with the manager of his wealth trusts in the Liechtenstein Alps in 2014. Ms Haynes said her ex sat next door while, over a mountaintop lunch, the trust boss assured her that a previous promise from Mr Austin that she would have half the value of the house, set out in a letter of wishes, would be honoured.
However, after a trial at the High Court, Judge Wicks KC has now rejected her claim, finding that any assurances given to Ms Haynes during the lunch were not binding. She said Ms Haynes had been taken through “an elaborate performance in getting her out to Liechtenstein” to make her feel more secure at a point when the relationship was under “strain” due to her “desire to be married”.
It had been a “bone of contention” that they were not married and Ms Haynes was concerned what her own mum would have thought about her being an unmarried mother, bringing up the kids alone in London with Mr Austin in Switzerland. That and further correspondence in 2016 had involved administrators of the trusts, on Mr Austin’s instructions, “tip-toeing up to the line with Ms Haynes to give her comfort, but without crossing it into making a firm commitment,” she said.
She said the events of March 2014, involving “the flying out to Zurich” and her Liechtenstein Alps meeting with trust boss, Dr Markus Wanger, had been an “elaborate performance” to make her feel more secure, despite being unmarried. The judge rejected Ms Haynes’ claim to half the proceeds of sale of the house and her bid to force its sale last week, saying: “In my judgment, the representations made by Dr Wanger in 2014 fall short of the promise of an interest in the property which is required for a proprietary estoppel.
“On the one hand, they were undoubtedly intended to be relied on by Ms Haynes: Mr Austin and Dr Wanger took her through an elaborate performance in getting her out to Liechtenstein and allowing her to see Mr Austin’s letter of wishes being formally notarised. It can hardly be said to have been unreasonable for her, in the circumstances, to have relied on what was then said and done.
“But what she was told on that occasion was not that the letters of wishes conferred, or would confer, an interest in the property on her. It was that Dr Wanger had a genuine intention to administer a discretionary trust on the basis set out in the letters of wishes and she could trust him to do so.
“Objectively, a reasonable person would have understood from Mr Austin’s letter of wishes that it was revocable and that, if circumstances changed, Dr Wanger might depart from what was there set out. I do not consider that Dr Wanger made clear that he was giving a promise that would not be revoked, particularly if her relationship with Mr Austin subsequently foundered.”