Saatchi and Lawson considered credit card bills ‘trivial’

Charles Saatchi and Nigella Lawson considered monthly credit card bills of tens of thousands of pounds run up by their assistants to be "trivial matters", with Saatchi becoming concerned only when the sums reached an average of £76,000 a month, a court has been told.

Francesca and Elisabetta Grillo, two of five of the couple's assistants to have company credit cards, were averaging bills of £48,000 and £28,000 a month respectively when their spending first began to cause alarm, the art dealer's finance director, Rahul Gajjar, told a jury at Isleworth crown court in west London.

The two sisters are accused of spending £685,000 of the former celebrity couple’s money, which the crown alleges they spent on designer clothes, flights and five-star hotels.

They deny fraud. Mr Gajjar told the court that he had confronted Francesca Grillo (35), in July 2012 with a copy of her company credit card bill for the previous month, which ran to 15 pages and totalled more than £64,336.97.

While some purchases had been on behalf of the Saatchi and Lawson family, he said, Ms Grillo had acknowledged that she had spent more than £34,000 on luxury goods for herself.

These included flights to and from New York costing more than £2,300 each way, luxury hotels in London, Paris, New York and Mallorca, and designer clothes and accessories including a £723 dress from Chloe, a jacket and shoes costing £2,725 from Miu Miu and a Louis Vuitton bag priced £2,300.

On a single day, June 12th, he said, Ms Grillo had admitted spending £5,385 in Miu Miu and making two payments of £1,195 and £1,455, a total of more than £8,000.

Elisabetta Grillo (41), who, like her sister, had worked for the couple for more than a decade, had admitted spending almost £5,000 on personal items in the same month, Mr Gajjar said, at stores including Harvey Nichols and Harrods.

A company taxi account showed 107 personal trips booked by Francesca and 10 by Elisabetta during June 2012.

Mr Gajjar, now the chief operating officer of the Saatchi Gallery group, said Francesca Grillo had initially offered to repay the money, texting him after their initial meeting to say she wanted to get “everything back on the right angle”.

But when she discovered that her membership of the Soho House private members’ club, paid for by Lawson, had been cancelled, she had contacted him to say: “If they [Saatchi and Lawson] carry on doing things like this where they bring this very private matter in public, I won’t have any other choice but to go to court.

“Please try to handle the situation better, because I feel I deal with rebellious teenagers. If one small thing happens before we meet they leave me with no choice but going legal.”

He said Saatchi and Lawson, who have since divorced acrimoniously, had then offered to allow the women to remain in their employment and living rent free in Lawson’s flat in Battersea, but to have their salaries of £28,000 and £25,000 deducted by £1,000 for Francesca and £250 for Elisabetta “until they are satisfied they have been repaid”.

Asked by Jane Carpenter, prosecuting, how the sisters had responded to the proposal, Mr Gajjar said: "I remember a reference: 'We're being treated worse than Filipino slaves.' They were absolutely against the proposal."

He said he had prepared a letter inviting the two women to agree to the proposal and admit they had “fraudulently stolen money”, but that they had refused to sign it, saying had they done so they would have been tied to the company “for the rest of their lives”.

Lawyers for Francesca and Elisabetta Grillo have previously argued that their spending had been with the tacit agreement of Lawson, on the understanding that they did not reveal to her then husband that she was a daily user of cocaine, class B drugs and prescription medication.

Saatchi and Lawson are both expected to give evidence in the trial. The case continues.

Guardian