In My Shoes: A Memoir (14 page)

If my father had been alive, I’m sure we would have resisted. Robert was an employee, an obstructive, pain-in-the-ass employee who could be replaced. But I still hadn’t found my voice. I was still complying with the unreasonable in order to evade and avoid.

I also felt trapped. I needed this deal to go through because it’s only
during these exit transactions that a partner in a private-equity deal can cash out, and I was counting on realizing the capital I needed to live on. If I resigned the deal would most likely collapse—I was actually part of what was being purchased, creativity as a form of chattel. Beyond that fact, and while I had a huge emotional investment in the brand, Jimmy Choo was by far the best financial investment I could make. I would be leaving in a large stake, so to ensure the increase in the value of that investment, I had to stay on and be on top of my game, in order to keep the brand creative and fresh. Under those circumstances, continuing to work with Robert was a bitter pill I was simply going to have to swallow.

Before he died, my dad told me, “We’ll probably sell this company for £100 million, and it will be right around November.” On November 14, a memo went around listing a price of £101 million. I only wish my dad could have been there to relish the moment and to receive this one last confirmation of his business acumen. But tribute enough—after transaction fees and what little debt we had, the Yeardye family’s share was a return on his initial investment of three hundredfold.

The legalities remained to be worked out, and after the announcement, Robert came to me and said, “I think we should use the same lawyers, Travers Smith. We can save on costs.”

I had used Andrew Roberts in the past, and he had been at Travers, so this seemed to make sense.

I said, “Sure.” Another rookie mistake.

What hadn’t occurred to me was the extent to which I was swimming with sharks and that I needed personal representation. Once again, Robert was only one shark among many. The one who would
give me the most grief was the one I’d had to deal with all my life. As I would soon learn, despite my fond hopes of distancing myself, my mother still had her teeth embedded in my flesh.

The allocation of shares between our two trusts would become a morass of confusion, at least in her mind, which would lead to a legal battle that would consume years of my life and millions of dollars, and bring me to the edge of despair.

T
he signing of the Lion deal was scheduled for November 18, 2004, and we had a conference call line open twenty-four hours a day to iron out last-minute complexities. Among these pesky details was the requirement that the agreement be approved and signed before magistrates on the island of Jersey, where the family trusts had been set up. Our operations centers were in the UK and the United States, but Jimmy Choo Jersey Limited, in Jersey, actually owned the brand and licensed it to Jimmy Choo Limited. JCL ran operations, and JCJ received royalties. There were no taxes on the income received by JCJ in Jersey so long as it was not repatriated to the UK.

Jersey, officially known as the Bailiwick of Jersey, is a strange little place that might have been dreamed up for a Monty Python routine, somewhere between
Spamalot
and the “Ministry of Silly Walks.” Lying only twelve miles off the coast of France, it is a British Crown dependency. In Viking times it had been kicked back and forth between the dukes of Normandy and the dukes of Brittany, but it’s been more or less English since William and all that in 1066. It’s famous for its cows, but its real economy is devoted to financial services, making it rather like the Caymans, only with foul weather.

To accommodate the signing requirements, David Burns and Robert
booked seats on the forty-five-minute flight to Saint Helier, Jersey’s capital, and they were on their way to Gatwick when Akeel called to discuss how Lyndon was going to be financing the acquisition—which was by taking on massive debt.

Robert was livid that, by being acquired, we were putting the company £50 million in the hole. (I, on the other hand, wasn’t even informed of this development.)

To calm the waters, Lyndon called Robert and asked him to come to their offices on Grosvenor Place, just opposite Buckingham Palace, where he explained how the debt was being structured in a way that would allow Robert to leverage his own equity stake. Our CEO was reassured, but by now they’d missed the last flight to Jersey.

Lyndon graciously offered his own NetJet, and when they landed, they went straight to the lawyer’s office in Saint Helier, and the signing dragged on and on. At quarter past eight the pilot called to remind them that Jersey’s airport closed at nine, but there was still plenty of fine print to read, and it wasn’t until ten that the deal was done.

I’d spent the evening waiting by the phone at my lawyer’s office, and after the call came through I took a deep breath and went over to my mother’s house to “share the good news.” I found her sitting by herself in her living room, her knees pulled up to her chest, rocking back and forth. I knelt down and said, “Mom, they’ve signed it. Everything’s done. You’re going to have plenty of money. You’re going to be okay.”

I think this may have been the one instance when I found it possible to set aside her lifelong cruelty to me and feel real compassion for her. At the same time, I still felt like a wounded child, not only angry but still hoping against hope for a crumb of recognition. I would have
given the world for a single word of kindness from her, a simple, “Well done.” But she simply kept rocking and staring off into space. It was frightening and very sad. And as usual, there was nothing for me.

Back in Jersey, the Jimmy Choo financial team was forced to stay over, neither having packed so much as a toothbrush. They flew out again at six in the morning, but no one thought to send a car to Luton Airport north of London, and these high-rolling gentlemen enjoyed the novelty of taking the commuter rail back into town.

When I received my copies of all the final documents, I reviewed all the details, including the distribution of “sweet equity,” the small number of shares set aside as an added incentive for management. According to a preexisting agreement, Robert and I were to have parity on all remuneration. And yet I noticed right away that Robert had received 5 percent and that I had received only 3 percent sweet equity.

So at the first board meeting I spoke up. “This isn’t right,” I said. “Our agreement was to have parity on this.”

Lyndon acknowledged my point, and he told Robert to put the extra 2 percent back into the pot so that it could be distributed on exit.

This was a directive from the chairman of the board, stipulated at a board meeting and entered into the minutes, so I went on about my business, feeling certain that the error would be corrected.

My lawyer, Andrew Roberts, called and said, “Do you want me to follow up?”

I said, “No. I trust Lyndon on this. Besides, it’s in the minutes of a board meeting.”

Another rookie mistake. I should never have been so naive.

Over the next two years, Lyndon came to perhaps two board
meetings, and when he did, none of his earlier talk of strategic vision could be found. As usual, EBITDA was all that mattered. Lyndon sent over his bean counter, Robert Darwent, to count all the beans, and as long as the numbers were looking good, that was that.

•  •  •  •

THEN, AS IF MY PERSONAL
soap opera weren’t sudsy enough, it spilled over into farce when Matthew got arrested for hacking into my computers.

As we’d been working our way toward the sale of Jimmy Choo, he must have worried that I’d be siphoning off cash to numbered accounts in Switzerland or the Caymans. He had Jaws request financial details that we thought were intrusive, so we refused. Not long after, I began to receive e-mails claiming to have “things on your soon-to-be-ex-husband.” I thought this sounded not only sleazy but creepy. I’d also noticed that Matthew seemed to think he had quite a bit of privileged information about our business, even though his information was incorrect.

The Metropolitan Police soon showed up and asked to examine my computer. They explained that the e-mails I’d been receiving were Trojan horse messages containing viruses. If opened, this “malware” could record every keystroke on my keyboard.

As it turned out, Matthew had hired a company called Active Investigation Services to explore any and all electronic transactions. This company was run by a couple of former policemen who were already under surveillance for running a lucrative sideline in illegal wiretapping and computer hacking. To keep Matthew on the hook, they’d even sent
him a bogus e-mail, supposedly from my lawyer, alluding to several million I’d supposedly secreted away in Malaysia.

The climax of this series of events occurred when London’s finest raided Matthew’s apartment at six a.m. and took him away in handcuffs.

My husband was charged with criminal conspiracy and faced the possibility of five years in prison. Eventually, I would be subpoenaed to testify. For now, in addition to everything else, I had to deal not only with my daughter’s father being indicted and out on bail but also with the paparazzi and detectives snooping around in the bushes outside my house.

•  •  •  •

ON JANUARY 24, 2005, THE
Yeardye family met at the Pelham Hotel in South Kensington for one of the meetings we had several times a year to go over the trusts. My mother was there with my brother Gregory, along with Timothy Gere, a financial adviser, and I could feel the tension immediately when I walked in the room. They were already deep into a tête-à-tête
with Raj Patel, the accountant, and Nick Morgan, the trustee from CI Law on the island of Jersey. I wondered what the hell was going on.

When the meeting came to order, Nick began with a celebratory tone, noting the recent surge in the assets under his guardianship and acknowledging my role in helping to create that wealth and to bring it into the family fold. The two trusts collectively were being enriched by roughly £44 million, which, after transaction fees and other expenses, represented our 49 percent share of a company valued at £101 million.

There was discussion about the tax implications of my mother’s move to the United States, and then it came time to review the allocation of the Lion proceeds to the two separate trusts. My mother had taken her half of the £44 million entirely in cash to set her up in retirement. Thus the Marqueta Trust, the one established for her benefit, had received a direct infusion of roughly £22 million in cash.

My situation was a bit more complicated. I had taken my half of the Yeardye holdings partly in cash, but then I’d rolled the rest back into the company. As I mentioned earlier, this large reinvestment of many millions had actually been a requirement of the deal with Lion.

Nick passed around the summary of the accounts, and I saw immediately that, in the Araminta Trust, half the cash was missing. You don’t have to be a financial genius to note a discrepancy of several million pounds.

“What the hell is this?” I said. “You’re only showing half the money I cashed out.”

Nick mumbled for a moment, then explained that, with my divorce still in process, he thought it best to hide some of my money, so he’d decided on his own to transfer half my cash from my trust to my mother’s. He freely admitted that the money was mine—he was just trying to “reduce my exposure.”

So he’d assigned my money to a trust that benefits the one person who had always seemed to question my basic right to exist. He’d handed over my money to the one person I trusted least in the world.

I said, “Nick, you need to put this back.” Then I repeated, with rising emphasis, just below a scream: “Put it back.”

As I investigated further, I saw that the cash left in my trust, the
cash that at least had been properly accounted, was not properly invested. People at the time were making a 10 percent return on equities, and I wasn’t even getting the standard bank interest. Even at 5 percent, which was the going bank rate at the time, I was missing out on tens of thousands of pounds in interest every month.

Then, just to top it all off, my mother slid a piece of paper across the table. I was already so angry that I could hardly focus, so it took me a moment to realize that what I was looking at was a list of debits she had been running against me. While I’d been working myself silly trying to build the brand that had just delivered £22 million into her account (not to mention several million more that was not rightly hers), she’d been drawing up a list of my infractions, which included the rent money I’d borrowed from my dad, which, as I was quick to point out, I had already paid back.

And then it got genuinely creepy. She wanted reimbursement for clothing she’d bought for Minty while I was away on business. Thanks to me she’d just come into £22 million, and she wanted me to pay her back for a few hundred pounds I’d asked her to spend on her own granddaughter?

But then I saw the entry that really chilled me because I could already see where it might lead. Back when we were first expanding into North America, Dad had mortgaged their house for £600,000 and loaned the company the money. She now wanted me to pay back the amount in full, even though it was clearly documented—and verified by Nick Morgan the trustee and Raj Patel the accountant—that before my father died he had been fully reimbursed by the company. The most frustrating, and frightening, part of it all was her failure to understand
even the most basic arithmetic as it pertained to the business and how it was structured.

It was the American company, half owned by Philip Rogers, that had received the loan. At most, I was half owner of the other half, which was owned by my father, thus obligating me for one-quarter of the loan, which, again, had already been paid back. But in my mother’s eyes, anything that was not as she thought it should be was my responsibility. Thus somehow I needed to pay back the entire amount. It was her lifelong fixation: Anything that was wrong was Tamara’s fault. It had been that way for as long as I could remember. But how can a person incur that kind of wrath and resentment as an infant or a toddler? What had I ever done to deserve this?

Marqueta was making certain distributions of money to banks outside the trust to provide monthly income for my mother. The trust was also buying her a new house in Beverly Hills and arranging for the insurance. But my mother persisted in her tone of injury, complaining about me and saying how sad it was that she was going to be all alone and having to take care of a big house all by herself, at which point I simply lost it.

“I bought you that fucking house!” I screamed.

You might say that after that, our relationship began to deteriorate.

Elsewhere on the domestic front, my divorce was still proceeding to trial. This separate legal matter required a financial hearing to determine all the assets of both parties. By this time, I was both emotionally and physically exhausted, barely able to stay conscious as I sat in the courtroom listening to the judge’s recitation of the facts. Suddenly I was wide awake—given a jolt of adrenaline far stronger, and far less
pleasant, than any illegal high I’d ever taken on—as I heard the judge say “. . . primary asset is in the form of 32,000 shares in Jimmy Choo Limited, which is . . . blah blah blah.”

I was apoplectic, but as was my custom at the time, I kept the rage inside. Here, for once, my lifelong predilection for hiding my feelings served me well, at least in that it allowed me to exit the courtroom before I screamed out, “What the fuck!!!?”

Straightaway I called Nick Morgan.

“What the hell is going on?” I said. “Half my shares are missing.”

He fumbled and mumbled, appearing not to understand.

“I own sixty-four thousand shares in Jimmy Choo,” I went on. “The Araminta Trust shows thirty-two thousand.”

He was useless, so I called Raj Patel, the accountant for the trusts.

“Where are my shares?” I said.

He, too, seemed confused at first, and then evasive, and then as he began what I suppose was meant as an explanation, I remembered a conversation we’d had at the Jimmy Choo offices just after the closing. I’d been going over documents related to the family’s allocations when Raj very casually called me aside and said, “You know, there are some extra shares. How do you want to deal with them, vis-à-vis your mother, I mean? Do you want to split them?”

And I said, “Sure.”

Once again, I was naive. Perhaps evasive. Distracted. Maybe simply stupid. But I thought he was talking about the sweet equity, which was three points, and while that was a serious amount of money, I was willing to be generous. There was no reason we should have split it, but
this was still at the time that I was bending over backward to be nice to my mother.