The recent, turbulent history of the Dick family reads like a Netflix reboot of Bleak House. For this is the tale of an unending court case involving the recent sale of a fabulous mansion in one of Britain’s better known tax havens, home to a man whose rags-to-riches life could have been penned by Charles Dickens.
John W Dick was raised in Canada as a Mennonite – a Christian sect whose members live humble, God-fearing lives.
It’s a long way from the rarefied world he inhabits now. Today the 82-year-old tycoon rubs shoulders with business titans and political leaders and lives a life of immense luxury. He is a director of media giant Liberty Global, which owns Virgin Media, and an honorary consul for the Rwandan government.
Dick – tall, bald and charismatic – has lived in St John’s Manor, described as the finest house on Jersey, for more than 40 years. Until recently he was also the Seigneur of St John, a feudal title that carried privileges, including the right to execute servants.
But instead of enjoying his twilight years in regal style, the multimillionaire is locked in an extraordinarily messy legal feud with his daughter by his first marriage, Tanya Dick-Stock, and her husband, Darrin Stock, a US businessman.
Father v daughter: the claims and counter-claims
Few things about the feud are clear. Dick-Stock alleges that her father, abetted by others, has defrauded family trusts – offshore vehicles used to protect assets from the taxman – of which she is a beneficiary, of tens of millions of pounds. She is also heavily critical of the way the Jersey authorities and its financial services industry have investigated her claims.
Dick vigorously disputes his daughter’s allegations. He regards her and her husband as “wholly unreliable” and untrustworthy, citing, among other things, both criticism she received in a Jersey court and the number of court proceedings in which the couple are involved in the US.
Dick’s lawyers also say his daughter does not have the authority to bring the case against her father as the company bringing the action is in receivership, and therefore litigation should be controlled by the receiver.
They point out that none of the trusts’ other beneficiaries, including her own brother, John Dick II, share her views. The entire Dick family, not just Tanya, has been the victim of an audacious fraud, they say.
Lawyers for Dick-Stock deny allegations that she is untrustworthy and insist she is entitled to bring a separate personal claim against her father.
A spokesman for Dick-Stock said the case was due to be heard on 6 July.
This may seem just a story about a wealthy family’s spectacular implosion in a British Crown Dependency that prizes its independence from the mainland: think Bergerac meets Succession. But the father-daughter battle which, until now, has gone largely unreported, affords a rare glimpse of how the secretive offshore trust system, set up to protect assets from the taxman, can be exploited for fraudulent purposes.
Indeed, while there is now almost nothing upon which Dick and his daughter do agree, both believe that a massive fraud has been perpetrated in Jersey, the scale of which has yet to be truly appreciated. Some view the row as a wake-up call for the island.
Lurking in the shadows, out of sight of regulators and law enforcement, the offshore trust system appears ripe for manipulation, with beneficiaries often unaware of how their assets are being used. Anonymous trusts that are trustees of other trusts based in different tax havens shuffle money and assets around like cards, using them as security for loans.
Frank Casey, the financial analyst who blew the whistle on the Bernie Madoff scandal, drew comparisons between the conditions under which the disgraced financier was able to operate his ponzi scheme and the way the system functions in tax havens around the world.
“The similarities are really striking,” Casey said. “The basic elements are a lack of transparency and no reportability.”
This in turn raises an important question: if trusts’ beneficiaries are not always aware of what is happening to their assets, what hope is there for external regulators and law enforcement agencies trying to stop them being used to launder money for kleptocrats, mobsters and drug cartels?
The clearest indication that there was trouble in paradise came last month when St John’s Manor was sold after languishing for two years on the market, the asking price having been slashed from £22m to a reported £17.5m.
The estate agent’s sales brochure describes the 11,000 sq ft pile, which dates back to the 14th century, as having “magnificent” landscaped grounds, a “stunning” Japanese water garden, stables, a swimming pool, a squash court and a falconry. It also has a chapel where Tanya and Darrin were married and underneath which Dick intends to be buried.
Dick-Stock alleges that, down the years, Dick family trusts have had claims over St John’s Manor as well as other properties including flats in St Petersburg, Jersey and Mayfair, a farm, a fleet of luxury cars and even a vintage doll collection.
She also claims to have seen documents that show the trusts once owned a Botticelli painting worth an estimated $20m, a claim categorically denied by her father.
But it is the fabulous house that is at the centre of the row. Both father and daughter agree that St John’s Manor was used to fraudulently secure a £6.5m loan from HSBC Jersey. It is claimed that a trustee of the Dick family trusts, an obscure offshore services company called PanTrust, played a key role in the alleged fraud before misappropriating the HSBC loan.
If true, PanTrust’s actions run counter to everything a trustee – a person or body who has a duty to protect a trust’s assets – is supposed to do, in this case represent the interests of the entire Dick family.
The Panama connection and the shady financial adviser
But then PanTrust is not your average trustee. The company featured prominently in the Panama Papers, the massive leak of confidential documents from law firm Mossack Fonseca that revealed how hundreds of wealthy individuals and companies had parked their money offshore, in some cases illegally.
Banned from operating by the Panamanian regulator in February 2015, PanTrust was found to have set up a complex ponzi scheme in which scores of fake accounts were paying fictitious rates of interest with the results that scores of trusts were fleeced of millions of pounds.
The Panamanian regulator also ruled that the firm had failed in its duty to prevent money-laundering and terrorist financing. To this day it has the distinction of being the only company in Panama to ever lose its trust licence.
PanTrust was run by a man called Richard Wigley, who managed Dick’s financial affairs for 30 years until his fraudulent acts were discovered. And it is the relationship between the two men that is now at the centre of the dispute between father and daughter. Was Wigley acting independently of Dick or, as his daughter insists, on his behalf?
A Royal Court of Jersey judgment refers to a memo prepared by Wigley which claimed that Dick would receive a share of PanTrust’s income. But Dick’s representatives insist that he has never received an income from PanTrust. They say that it was Dick who drew PanTrust to the attention of the Panamanian regulator and that Wigley abused his position and defrauded the Dick family over three decades.
It was during court proceedings to have him removed as a trustee that Wigley’s lawyers made a bombshell admission. They acknowledged that he had created 24 fraudulent loans worth $30m involving a series of trusts set up for the Dick family.
Then events took an even more extraordinary turn.
According to Dick-Stock’s legal action against her father, filed in 2018 in the district court, Denver County, Colorado, where one of the family trusts was established, it was only after Wigley had been removed as a trustee that she claims she discovered “John W Dick was not a victim of … Wigley, but instead a confederate”.
“When she suspected her father it was like Friday the 13th, when the mask slips and you find out who Jason really is,” Stock said.
To say Dick denies the claim would be a serious understatement. A representative said: “John Dick and his family dispute the entirety of Tanya’s alternative history.”
Last June, the Dick-Stocks wrote to HSBC Jersey, informing it that the Jersey police and the US authorities had been alerted to allegations that the loan against St John’s Manor had been secured fraudulently. Dick’s representatives say they are not aware of any investigations. A spokeswoman for HSBC Jersey said: “We can’t comment due to client confidentiality.”
A team of financial experts hired by Dick-Stock are examining whether other trusts linked to PanTrust – and two related trust companies – have also been plundered. There are claims that hundreds of millions of pounds may have been looted without the trust beneficiaries being aware of what had happened.
Question marks over the whistleblowers
It is for this reason that Dick-Stock and her husband present themselves as whistleblowers. They have approached the Jersey Financial Services Commission (JFSC) and the island’s financial crime unit, the JFCU, seeking their help in securing an investigation into the HSBC loan and their wider allegations of fraud, misappropriation and corruption. They claim to have handed over to the island’s authorities and its police force thousands of pages of documents relating to hundreds of offshore trusts, which would make explosive reading, should they ever become public.
But some are sceptical about their allegations and the sceptics have evidence to back their claims. Multiple lawsuits have been brought against the couple, including for unpaid debts. They have also fallen out with their original lawyers and other members of the extended Dick family.
Dick-Stock’s credibility as a witness was also heavily criticised in related proceedings brought in the Royal Court of Jersey. The court said, among other things, the evidence she gave was “at odds with what she has said on oath to other courts in other places and she has frequently changed her case and evidence”. It concluded “we did not find Tanya’s evidence reliable nor did we find reliable evidence called on her behalf.”
A spokeswoman for the JFSC confirmed that it was aware of the couple’s allegations and referred to the judgment above which raises serious questions about Dick-Stock’s credibility and that of her claim as a whole.
The JFSC spokeswoman said: “It is important to note that our role, as the regulator, is not to investigate allegations of fraud, as fraud is a criminal offence.”
Compendium: Miami, money laundering and a mafia link
It’s not the first time Dick has found himself up against a family member in a lengthy court case.
In the early 90s, while embroiled in divorce proceedings with his second wife, Elizabeth, he was reportedly held in a Jersey prison for 22 days until her alimony payments were resolved. However, in reality he ended up living under house arrest in his mansion for health reasons.
The divorce, which was notable for the fact that it took seven years to conclude – two years more than the marriage lasted – shone light on a secretive Jersey-based trust called Compendium which, it transpired, was the trustee of a John Dick trust.
Compendium, the US authorities discovered, had been used by a Miami-based lawyer, Lawrence Freeman, who was indicted for laundering money for the mafia and drug runners. At the time, the court heard suggestions that the Dick family fortune was worth an estimated $1.2bn, a figure Dick’s representatives now describe as “wildly inaccurate”.
‘It’s like launching nuclear bombs. No one will win’
A copy of the divorce settlement also confirmed that the Dicks listed a Jersey-based company, Sandsend Financial Services, among the assets in which they had a shared financial interest. The company, which was dissolved in 1999, was accused of receiving millions of dollars plundered from US savings and loan firms in the 1980s. The Federal Home Loan Bank Board found that it had received $7m of funds from a looted savings association called Vision Banc “for no apparent reason”.
There is no suggestion, nor was there any suggestion at the time, that Dick knew Sandsend or Compendium were being used for illegal purposes. But now, almost 30 years after his high-profile divorce garnered headlines, Dick once again finds himself in the spotlight.
Ultimately the family feud, a modern-day Jarndyce v Jarndyce, may end in mutually assured destruction, just as it does in Bleak House, with only the lawyers celebrating.
Dick’s son, John Dick II, foresaw this possibility in a 2017 email he sent himself as a memo. While praising his sister for her “miraculous efforts” in trying to unpick the Dick family’s tortuous financial problems, he warned “both parties have the fiscal and mental fortitude to wage a war against each other but it would be the equivalent of launching nuclear bombs in which case neither party would win. The fallout would destroy what’s left of the assets as well as greatly impact the lives of everyone around them”.
Not to mention Jersey’s gilt-edged reputation for protecting the financial interests of the rich and powerful.
Too bad.
