I’m outraged! Socialite who sold chalet at cut-price to Duke hits out at Fergie’s £7m f lats
A FRENCH socialite who claims she was owed millions by the Duke and Duchess of York has spoken of her anger after learning that Sarah Ferguson has bought a luxury property for £7million in Mayfair.
Isabelle de Rouvre, 74, said she let the couple pay millions less than they owed for a ski chalet they were buying from her as she believed ‘Andrew was going to prison’ and Fergie ‘didn’t have a penny’.
She said the news that Prince Andrew’s former wife had purchased flats worth £7million was ‘incredible and unbelievable’.
Miss de Rouvre was forced to take the duke and duchess to court over the purchase of her chalet in Verbier, Switzerland, which they bought for about £18million in 2014.
Her friendship with them started when they repeatedly rented the seven-bed chalet, which cost more than £22,000 a week. It came
‘I thought she didn’t have a penny’
with six staff and has an indoor swimming pool, sauna, sun terrace and bar.
After she agreed to sell it to the Yorks, they took out a £13.25million mortgage and pledged to pay the remaining £5million in instalments. But when they failed to make some of the payments to her she took them to court.
She said she was owed a total of £6.8million, including interest, but agreed to a payment of £3.4million because she was under the impression they were short of money.
‘The whole thing became a mess,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t sleep, I just couldn’t carry on, so I settled for £3.4million to get away from it all and away from them. I was forced to get lawyers involved and I settled for about half the amount,’ she told The Sunday Times.
She said the multi-million-pound legal case brought against Prince Andrew by Virginia Giuffre, who alleged he had sex with her when she was 17, was also behind her decision to settle in November.
‘I understood they didn’t have the money and believed he would be going to prison so I thought it best to get what I could,’ she said. However, it emerged last week that the Duchess of York, 62, had purchased two flats in a mews house costing up to £7million from the Duke of Westminster.
It is said to be a ‘long-term investment’ for her daughters, Beatrice and Eugenie.
It is not known how much she paid, but the house had been split into two luxury apartments and put on the market separately this year for a total of £6.75million.
The duchess is converting the two flats back into one home.
But sources said she has no plans to leave the grace and favour 30-room Windsor mansion she shares with her disgraced ex-husband, 62, and instead plans to rent out the mews house. Miss de Rouvre said: ‘I am outraged that I am now told she has spent millions on another property. It is just incredible and the whole story unbelievable. It is a dirty story. I thought she didn’t have a penny.’
The purchase of the flats raises questions over how the duchess can afford them. In 2010 she said she was ‘continually on the verge of financial bankruptcy’. She also lost more than £3.2million in the collapse of Hartmoor, her US ‘lifestyle and wellness’ company.
In 2011 she accepted £15,000 from Jeffrey Epstein, the paedophile financier who introduced Andrew to Virginia Roberts, now Giuffre, to avoid bankruptcy. But sources said her finances improved after she began a writing career.
Andrew said he was not involved in purchasing the property. It has emerged that his pay-off to Mrs Giuffre in February was as little as a quarter of the reported £12million. Sources told The Sun his lawyers negotiated a deal of between £3million and £5million.
Mrs Giuffre, a victim of Epstein’s sex trafficking, claimed Andrew raped her when she was 17.
The duke and duchess are now trying to sell the ski chalet.
A spokesman for the duchess declined to comment.