10.

Enter the Fraudster

One overcast lunchtime in September 2011, a Rolls-Royce Phantom pulled up outside Virginia Withers’ farmhouse in rural Somerset. An overweight, ruddy-cheeked man in a navy jacket and shiny shoes clambered out and gave her a warm handshake. Paul Sutton was a friend of Virginia’s ex-husband, Dick Withers. Virginia and Dick, both pig farmers who had gone into racehorse breeding, had been childhood sweethearts, and they had remained on good terms despite separating twenty years earlier. The previous year, Dick Withers had met Paul Sutton through a plan to redevelop a stud farm in Newmarket, near Cambridge. Sutton had presented himself as a Monaco-based millionaire who was experiencing short-term cash-flow problems following a tax investigation. The stud-farm idea had fallen through because they failed to raise enough money, but Sutton wanted to pitch a new investment.

As Virginia prepared a beef casserole in the kitchen, Sutton described Snoozebox, a pop-up hotel operator that provided temporary accommodation for music festivals and sporting events using stackable freight containers as rooms, complete with hot and cold running water and free Wi-Fi. Snoozebox had been set up by Robert Breare, a shambolic serial entrepreneur with a magnetic personality, and its president was David Coulthard, a former Formula One racing driver. Coulthard had arranged for the company to erect forty rooms at Silverstone for the British Grand Prix that summer. Sutton said he was helping Snoozebox to raise a round of private funding ahead of a potential stock market float. With his East End stockbroker’s patter, gold watch and neat white hair, Sutton looked plausible. Virginia thought he was ‘very smart and sort of sounded as if he knew what he was doing’. To Dick, he was ‘very, very nice, but also very persuasive’. Over the next week, Sutton bombarded the pair with calls, urging them to invest. Virginia and Dick were in their sixties, and they were concerned about the risk, but Sutton promised that they would receive three times their money back within three years.

Virginia had already drawn down £100,000 against the value of her farmhouse through an equity release scheme in anticipation of the abortive stud-farm plan. Sutton asked her to hand over £75,000 for Snoozebox. In the early hours of the morning allotted for one of his assistants to drive down and oversee the bank transfer, Virginia panicked and called Dick to tell him she had a bad feeling about it. Dick spoke to Sutton, then rang back at 2.30 a.m. to soothe her doubts. Sutton’s brother-in-law, Neil Burns, collected the money and gave Virginia a handwritten statement guaranteeing repayments of £1,100 a month. He asked her to sign a non-disclosure agreement to keep the deal confidential. Dick then sold his 115-acre farm overlooking the Blackdown Hills and sent Sutton the £600,000 proceeds, followed by a further £250,000, including a lump sum from his pension. Two of their friends, a vegetable farmer called Richard Clarke and a professional footballer called Scott Rogers, also invested £50,000 between them. Sutton said that all their stakes in Snoozebox would be held by his intermediary company, B52 Investments. He distributed home-made B52 share certificates.

Over the next two years, Virginia received sporadic repayments totalling about £15,000. Then the money stopped. She sent Sutton a series of increasingly desperate letters, which he mostly ignored. She sold antique furniture and jewellery to meet her mortgage payments, until she was finally forced to sell her four-bedroom farmhouse, along with its twenty stables and sixteen acres of land. Luckily, Virginia was able to buy a smaller property with help from her son. Dick lost almost everything. Financially ruined, he ended up living in a caravan in Devon. At the time of writing, HM Revenue & Customs was preparing to make him bankrupt over an unpaid capital-gains tax bill relating to the sale of his farm, and he was contemplating putting down some of his remaining horses because he could not afford to keep them. Clarke and Rogers also lost most of their money, although they were young enough to shrug it off.

Unfortunately for the Withers and their friends, Sutton was a convicted fraudster and one of Britain’s most prolific con men. He raised more than £5 million through B52 Investments, of which just £720,000 was invested in Snoozebox shares. Sutton kept his name off all the paperwork, but his fingerprints were everywhere. In 2016, one of Sutton’s creditors managed to put B52 into liquidation. Edge Recovery, the firm of insolvency practitioners appointed to comb through its records, reported ‘major concerns’ with the way the company had been run. Edge said the entire £5.3 million invested into B52 had flowed out again, with Sutton and his brother-in-law Neil Burns receiving ‘a large amount of money for what appears to be personal expenditure’. Among other things, investors’ cash had been used to buy an Aston Martin, a Fiat and a Maserati – all of which were missing. Edge said, ‘Although large amounts appeared to be utilized by Mr Burns and Mr Sutton, both of these parties have since been made bankrupt. Accordingly, any recovery of monies from these parties would not be possible.’ The firm added that B52’s shares in Snoozebox had been transferred – apparently for free – to a number of people, some of whom were connected to Sutton and Burns. The liquidator’s report suggested that Burns, through his association with Sutton, had serious questions to answer.

In any case, Snoozebox turned into a disaster. Robert Breare had come up with the idea after being caught short in the middle of the night during an uncomfortable camping trip to the Le Mans 24 Hours motor race. According to one of Breare’s family, ‘the awful Mr Paul Sutton’ inveigled his way into a shareholding early on. ‘Robert hit very bad times at one stage, and every now and again [Sutton] would slip Robert an envelope of money,’ she said. After Snoozebox was listed on the stock market in April 2012, the shares initially shot up as Breare gave effusive interviews suggesting that its containers could one day be helicoptered to the front line by the Ministry of Defence. The price crashed in April 2013 when problems emerged with a contract to accommodate security staff for the London Olympics, and Breare, who once declared that he wanted to ‘drive a Ferrari like the next person’, was ousted in May. Two months later, he was found dead at home in Ascot by his ex-wife, Susie. Breare, who was severely diabetic, had suffered a massive heart attack. He was just sixty. Snoozebox limped along until it went into administration in 2017.

Virginia Withers was stoic and sturdy. She had almost died at the age of forty-two when a racehorse suddenly reared up and kicked her in the face. She lost sight in one eye, where a fragment of bone pierced the optic nerve and caused a haemorrhage, and she spent fifteen days on life support before undergoing a nine-hour operation to save the other. Despite the heartbreak of Sutton and B52, she saw herself as ‘lucky to be alive’. B52’s other victims ranged from an insurance broker to a group of single mothers, and not all were able to be so philosophical. Madeleine Legwinski, who was divorced from the former Ipswich Town and Fulham midfielder Sylvain Legwinski, invested a total of £550,000 after meeting Sutton’s girlfriend, Nicola Tarrant, outside the gates of Hill House, a private prep school in Knightsbridge where their children were enrolled. Legwinski thought Tarrant was ‘a beautiful, very charming woman’. She said that after her divorce settlement came through, Sutton stood in the kitchen of her home in Chelsea and declared, ‘I’m going to make you a deal because you’re family, and we love you and the kids.’ Sutton promised she would get back three times her investment and that the interest would cover her rent and her two sons’ school fees.

Like the Withers and their friends, Legwinski received home-made share certificates for B52 rather than Snoozebox. Like Virginia, she saw her repayments dry up without explanation after a couple of years, leaving her in a state of constant financial panic. When Legwinski challenged Sutton and Tarrant over her investment, they blamed Robert Breare and Snoozebox’s poor performance, although in reality most of her money had been used to fund their opulent lifestyle. A letter from B52 said, ‘The share price collapse was a shock to all of us and the price now sits at circa 10p per share, creating a loss for everybody. None of this was our fault and we were ignorant of any issues with the business until Robert Breare told us at the eleventh hour, which is all public knowledge.’ It went on to suggest that Legwinski was actually in debt to B52 because of the share price fall. However, it said, ‘As you are a friend, the intention is still to get you a return on your money.’ With hindsight, Legwinski said, ‘They didn’t take my life, but they took everything my boys could have had. I look back today, I’m sitting here on my own and it’s like a different life for me. It’s like living in a nightmare.’

Sutton was a bizarre character. He was capable of spontaneous acts of kindness, such as when he drove one of his girlfriend’s sisters around pharmacies in London for hours to find the right medication for her mastitis, but he could also be utterly cold and ruthless. Wherever he was, asleep or awake, he liked to have the TV or radio crackling in the background, unable to spend time alone with his thoughts. He struggled to relax and was prone to attacks of obsessive compulsive disorder that would compel him to rush around a house unplugging electrical items and throwing away brand-new phone chargers. His life followed a long trail of destruction and dishonesty that led him, through a strange twist of fortune, to Sir Philip Green.

Paul Sutton’s early years are shrouded in mystery. According to his birth certificate, he was born in Barking hospital on 30 August 1956, to Richard, a stockbroker, and his wife, Bessie. The family lived in a small, shabby house on Kempton Road in East Ham. Some of Sutton’s business acquaintances thought he followed his father into the City and became a successful commodities trader, working in London and New York before retiring to Monaco as a millionaire while still in his twenties. Others said he was never more than an East End wide boy. According to a former employee, he was ‘always looking for acceptance’ from his parents. ‘If there was a deal done, no matter how small or stupid, his dad had to know,’ the acquaintance said.

The first indisputable record of Sutton’s activities is a High Court judgment in a case between Conister Trust, an outfit on the Isle of Man specializing in vehicle finance, and London Trust Bank, a small corporate lender. In late 1993, a Barclays bank manager on the Isle of Man made an ‘informal approach’ to the boss of Conister to say that his friend Paul Sutton wanted to buy a rental company there, Cleveland Car Hire. Sutton, who was looking for finance, sent Conister a business plan and an ‘extravagant’ CV mentioning multimillion-pound property deals in Paris and New York, ownership of land near Deauville in Normandy and a stud farm. When Conister asked Sutton to demonstrate that he could handle a loan of £500,000, he provided a reference from someone called Terry Riches at London Trust Bank. Riches wrote, ‘We feel he would not enter into any business arrangement he could not see his way clear to fulfil and therefore we believe he can be considered good for the amount mentioned.’

Conister went ahead and lent Sutton a total of £470,000 over the course of a year. The judge said that, within months, ‘both Mr Sutton’s personal account and the company account were beset by dishonoured cheques’, and towards the summer of 1994 ‘arrears of instalments were beginning to mount up’. Conister pulled the plug, appointing receivers from KPMG Peat Marwick. Their report made for ‘disturbing reading’. ‘Payments from Cleveland funds totalling £371,480 had been traced to Mr Sutton, his relatives or friends,’ the judge wrote. ‘A further £399,671 was unidentified spending, and included large cash withdrawals. A total of £771,157 had gone missing.’ The receivers found seventy cars, although Sutton had pledged more than a hundred as security to two other lenders. As a result, Conister’s loss was ‘almost total’.

It transpired that Sutton had been made bankrupt in 1982 at the age of twenty-five. He had not been discharged for at least a decade because of his ‘non-compliance’ with the rules, meaning he was bankrupt for the entire time he was running Cleveland. The judge said it was ‘significant’ that Terry Riches received a free Alfa Romeo Lusso TS2.0 in November 1993, the same month that Conister approved its loans to Sutton. ‘To put it at its lowest, Mr Riches was not acting in the best interests of his employers, LTB,’ he wrote. Riches later went to work for Sutton.

Sutton’s next known escapade was a strange property deal in Paris. In July 1995, he and an Irish business partner bought the headquarters of the industrial group Bouygues for 30 million francs (£4 million at the time) – although the seller, a company called SBT Immobilier, had paid 180 million francs for it less than two years earlier. Sutton’s associate, Sam MacCormick, had a relationship with Anglo Irish Bank, which agreed to lend them 46 million francs. As part of the deal, they paid 7 million francs to a company based in Liechtenstein called Minar Establishment, which had been granted an option over the building by SBT. Sutton and MacCormick ran the property through a company called Clamart III, which went bust in 1997 after it stopped paying bills. The Tribunal de Commerce in Nanterre, north-west Paris, accused Sutton of stripping Clamart III’s assets before it collapsed by taking 3.6 million francs in personal expenses and making Clamart III pay for work on the yacht he co-owned with MacCormick, Leave Me Alone.

Three judges found Sutton guilty of corporate negligence and misusing company assets, and said he had ‘acted with a particular dishonesty’. The court fined him 8 million francs and made him bankrupt for fifteen years. MacCormick was banned from running any company in France for eight years. Two years later, Nanterre’s Tribunal de Grande Instance convicted Sutton of further charges of abusing company assets and corporate theft. This time, he was sentenced to three years in prison to reflect ‘the nature and seriousness of the facts’. Sutton did not turn up to the hearing. A private investigator’s report commissioned by one of his creditors said that he fled Monaco in 2001, before the judgment was made public, leaving €20,000 in unpaid rent (£13,300 at the time). The investigator’s report said he had lived in Le Formentor, Sir Philip Green’s family home, and Le Roccabella, where Green would later take a penthouse. Sutton’s ex-wife stayed behind with their two daughters, whom he liked to call ‘the ladies’.

Sutton was a deal machine. ‘He couldn’t go on holiday and lie there for two weeks, having a good time,’ said one of his girlfriend’s sisters. ‘It always had to be work. He had to have a project and be on the phone. He absolutely hates Christmas because no one’s available on the phone. Hates the weekend.’ A separate private investigator’s report commissioned by another creditor listed the boggling collection of assets Sutton bought using bank loans between the late 1990s and the late 2000s, ranging from garages and petrol stations to property developments around the world. A former employee of the accountancy firm PwC’s Bermuda office, who was persuaded to join Sutton’s team, told one of the investigators, ‘In the five years I worked for him, I spent the first two and a half pretty busy, trying to push his deals through, but the last two and a half were spent spinning my wheels. I had caught onto the fact the guy is smoke and mirrors – and smoke and mirrors only. There is nothing behind the façade. He spends his whole time trying to raise money – and everything he owns is either on 100 per cent financing, or as close to that as possible.’

In 2002, while the fallout from his Parisian deal was still ongoing, Sutton was introduced to James Broughton, one of the sons of Lord and Lady Fairhaven, owners of a 2,000-acre estate called Kirtling near Newmarket. James had inherited a parcel of land north-east of Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk, and Sutton helped him negotiate the sale of an option to the renowned housebuilder Berkeley Group, which wanted to build 1,250 homes. Impressed, James took Sutton for afternoon tea with his parents at Anglesey Abbey, the family’s stately home. It was an invitation he came to regret bitterly. Sutton arrived in a Rolls-Royce and bowled over Lady Fairhaven with his easy charm and reassuring manner. She opened up about their financial problems. Kirtling was a classic aristocratic estate, built around a sixteenth-century tower with ornate gardens, and the Fairhavens had the classic aristocratic conundrum: they were asset-rich but cash-poor. In the past, the family had been forced to bridge the gap between income and outgoings by selling properties, which shrank their estate and created capital-gains liabilities. Sutton had a solution. He said the Fairhavens should borrow against the value of their estate from their bank, Hoare & Co., and invest the money in his projects, which would produce a guaranteed annual return of 18–20 per cent.

Sutton became the Fairhavens’ trusted adviser. In November 2003, six months after that fateful Sunday meeting, they gave him their precious Blue Book, which contained sensitive details of all their financial affairs. Over the next four years, Sutton persuaded Lord and Lady Fairhaven to raise £8 million and send the money to various companies under his control, often with minimal paperwork. As well as borrowing from Hoares, they sold their beloved farm in New South Wales. Another of the Fairhavens’ sons, Henry Broughton, had been to Cass Business School in north London and wanted to become a property developer. He began working as Sutton’s assistant, driving him around and listening to his tales of the big time. At first, Henry was star-struck as they flew to Monaco and the Caribbean to negotiate deals. One of Sutton’s grand ideas was a hare-brained scheme to redevelop a hotel in St Lucia, the Caribbean Jewel, into a $1 billion Monaco-style resort. Henry smelled a rat in 2008 when he heard that Sutton had stopped paying the labourers. When the Fairhavens investigated their investments with Sutton properly for the first time, the house of cards tumbled and he disappeared. They sued the law firm Wilsons for negligence, accusing their solicitors of failing to protect them from a ‘fraudster’ who had abused the ‘trust and confidence reposed in him’. The Fairhavens settled out of court in 2009, recouping almost 90 per cent of their losses from Wilsons. Sutton escaped from the wreckage and tiptoed away to do his next deal.

There was more in the same vein. The billionaire brothers David and Simon Reuben sued Sutton over an outstanding loan to one of his service station companies, Anglo Petroleum, which he had bought from the Spanish energy giant Repsol for £1. They were awarded £4 million damages after a seven-year battle, but Sutton never paid. By that point, Anglo Petroleum was in receivership and the Reubens were unable to find him to serve bankruptcy papers. There was also a fiasco with the former boss of Rover cars, Kevin Morley, who accused Sutton of agreeing to buy his yacht for £1 million, then sailing away without paying. ‘He conned me into thinking he had money to pay me for my boat,’ Morley told the Sunday Times in May 2009. ‘He didn’t have the funds, and even if he did he had no intention of paying.’ Sutton’s solicitors, Stockler Brunton, insisted that Morley had been given a £100,000 deposit and said a dispute had arisen over the boat’s condition. Sutton changed its name from Golden Horizon to Elephant Walk and had it refitted, but he neglected to pay the boatyard in Gibraltar. Morley eventually received £650,000 after the yacht was seized and auctioned by the French courts.

By 2013, Sutton had angered an incredible number of investors. Under pressure from some of his savvier B52 clients, who were worried about the share price slump at Snoozebox, he began to cast around for new ideas. Sutton and his cronies initially came up with Containasuite, a cheap knock-off of Snoozebox. They drafted a glossy thirty-two-page PowerPoint presentation for potential backers, promising there would be high demand for its pop-up hotel rooms from the oil and gas sectors and listing a set of fanciful forecasts predicting pre-tax profits of £28.7 million by June 2015. Then, just when he was in need of a shinier bauble to placate his critics, life dropped one of its funny opportunities into Sutton’s lap.

Robin Saunders, the American banker who had helped Green buy BHS, had seen her career at WestLB burn brilliantly but briefly. After its headline-grabbing bond issue for Formula One in 1999, her department had gone on a spree. Saunders, a former cheerleader who still found time to take hip-hop dance classes, was a natural beacon for publicity. In June 2002, she held a three-day party in Florence for her 40th birthday at a cost of £400,000, with an ‘Italian medieval’ dress code. She was also attracted to high-profile deals. WestLB bought the Pubmaster group, backed a management buyout of the Whyte & Mackay whisky company, financed the redevelopment of Wembley stadium and led a syndicate that took over Odeon cinemas. Saunders’ aggressive approach put her into competition with Guy Hands, a curly haired whizz-kid who was engineering deals at the Japanese bank Nomura, and it transformed WestLB’s financial performance. Despite the mild embarrassment of failed bids for the Wolverhampton & Dudley brewery group and the rail network operator Railtrack, at the end of 2002 Saunders’ bosses in Germany decided to put €5 billion (£3.1 billion at the time) behind her ‘principal finance’ division, as it was by then known, based on a recommendation from the management consultancy McKinsey.

Saunders’ downfall was precipitous. In the spring of 2003, one of her early deals unravelled. WestLB had organized a bond issue for the TV rental business Box Clever secured against customers’ future payments, but the advent of cheap flat-screen TVs destroyed the rental market almost overnight. WestLB suffered a massive write-down, which contributed to a €1.7 billion pre-tax loss in May 2003. BaFin, the German financial regulator, launched an initial investigation into the Box Clever deal, followed by a second into the personal stakes Saunders and her colleagues had taken in companies such as BHS. Saunders found herself splashed across the tabloids as well as the broadsheets when the wife of Marco Pierre White, the alpha-male chef, discovered a string of text messages from her on his phone and announced to his entire contacts book, ‘Marco Pierre White has left his wife and three children for Robin Saunders.’ (Pierre White, Saunders and her husband, Matthew Roeser, all denied there was anything more than a friendship.) A former colleague said that Saunders started coming into work in dark glasses, looking ‘as thin as a sparrow’. It was all too much for her state-owned bank’s bosses, who were being savaged by local politicians for risking taxpayers’ money on trophy foreign deals. WestLB decided to close her department. By the end of the year, she was gone.

Saunders reappeared six months later with a low-profile advisory firm, Clearbrook Capital, and from then on she stayed out of the limelight. In late January 2013, a mutual contact introduced her to Paul Sutton. Sutton told Saunders that he wanted to merge a temporary power company with Snoozebox. Saunders was uninterested, but Sutton produced a letter stating that he had £400 million on deposit in Monaco, so she agreed to keep him in mind for any other deals that might come up. They became friendly enough for Sutton to start renting desk space for his small team at Clearbrook’s offices on Grosvenor Street in Mayfair.

Saunders and Sir Philip Green had begun to drift apart even before her exit from WestLB. They had been fellow travellers for a short time in the debt-fuelled takeover years of the early 2000s, but Saunders had become uncomfortable with the way he routinely reduced other bankers to tears. She was also aware that rival billionaires would tease Green about her, saying that he had only made money because of her generosity. Saunders knew that the insecure tycoon would badmouth her in return, unable to resist rising to the bait. Nevertheless, Green still called for the occasional chat. A few months after Sutton arrived, Saunders happened to see the Topshop boss for one of their infrequent coffees. Green mentioned how much he would love to get rid of BHS, so Saunders suggested a meeting with her new millionaire tenant. Green apparently replied, ‘All right, let’s do that.’

In mid-April 2013, Saunders shepherded Sutton into Arcadia Group’s headquarters on Berners Street, off Oxford Street. Sutton was in no way intimidated by the prospect of meeting the king of the high street. In fact, with their Estuary accents and voluminous bellies, he and Green seemed like long-lost brothers. According to someone familiar with the conversation that ensued, they ‘got on like a house on fire’. As the two men chatted away, Sutton boasted that he was about to buy a $25 million yacht. Green offered Tina’s services as an interior decorator. The meeting went on for an hour, and they parted on warm terms. Saunders lost touch with Sutton soon afterwards as Clearbrook moved out of its offices on Grosvenor Street, leaving him behind, but a spark had been struck. A chain of events had been set in motion that would eventually bring devastating consequences – both for BHS’s staff and for Green.

According to Sutton, he and Green spoke by phone two weeks after that meeting, then sat down again for a shorter session. Sutton said, ‘Look, I can put together some people to have a look at it.’ Green told him, ‘Fine, carry on.’ Sutton claimed that Green promised to resolve the deficit in the pension funds himself with the words, ‘I’ll take care of that.’

Sutton concocted a rudimentary takeover codenamed Project Albion. His first forty-nine-page business plan, apparently produced using information provided by Arcadia and material scraped from the internet, said his company, Swissrock Holdings, would ‘acquire 100 per cent of the share capital of Albion Group [BHS]’. It said that Peter Graf, the former boss of a Swiss clothing retailer, Charles Vögele, would be chief executive, and it noted the possibility of raising £100 million from BHS’s property portfolio. Green engaged with Sutton even while he dismissed approaches from far more respectable suitors like Jay Schottenstein, the head of American Eagle Outfitters, and Christo Wiese, the South African billionaire. In fairness to Green, he was under the impression that Sutton had £400 million in the bank, although he clearly didn’t try very hard to verify the claim. Sutton was not bothered about the pension funds or the need for a dowry: he was just desperate for a deal. The convicted fraudster made sure that news of his talks with Green percolated through his network of investors to give them hope of recovering their money. Virginia Withers, the farmer who was persuaded to put £75,000 into B52, said that Sutton repeatedly told her he was going to buy BHS for £1 and ‘strip it right out’.

In August 2013, two victims who particularly hated Sutton tried to blow up his BHS deal. They flew to Monaco and delivered a brown envelope to the concierge on the ground floor of Green’s luxury apartment block, Le Roccabella. It contained a dossier on Sutton’s toxic past, including his 2002 French fraud conviction. Green received it and digested the contents, but – incredibly – continued to work on a sale to Sutton. In late January 2014, Sutton went into Arcadia’s headquarters to meet Green and his finance director, Paul Budge, who had replaced Paul Coackley at Green’s side. They had a wide-ranging discussion about Sutton buying everything in Green’s empire other than Topshop and Topman. It was serious enough for Budge to contact PwC, an advisory firm trusted by Green, and ask one of its senior partners to begin high-level work looking at how they would separate the businesses. Steve Denison, the PwC partner in question, relayed via email to his colleagues that ‘SPG may have a buyer for everything except TS/TM (an entrepreneur called Paul Sutton who has been sniffing around for a while)’.

In March, Sutton saw Budge again, this time with Neville Kahn, Green’s lead contact at Deloitte. They discussed how the separated BHS and Arcadia balance sheets would look. Sutton told them he was almost ready to make a formal bid. According to an email from Green’s PA, Katie O’Brien, which Sutton’s team forwarded to one of his investors as proof of the impending deal, Sutton was then invited to see Green in May (although the tycoon later claimed that meeting was arranged by mistake and cancelled). Abruptly and without explanation, the talks between Sutton and Green fizzled out. The dirty dossier could not have been the sole reason: Green had been in possession of its contents for nine months. A source close to Budge suggested that Sutton had been ‘discredited’ by a yacht broker in Monaco, who had a chance conversation with Green. Perhaps it was also the fact that Sutton had been made bankrupt yet again, in February 2014, at Bournemouth and Poole County Court. Whatever the reason, it was unimportant. Unknown to all except Green’s inner circle, a neat solution to the problem of Sutton’s poisoned reputation had already presented itself.