Who will bail out Sarah, Duchess Of York? | |
From the Telegraph: Quote: | As Sarah, Duchess of York celebrates her fiftieth birthday, it seems her finances are as chaotic as ever. | Quote:
When Sarah, Duchess of York, unwrapped the presents at her 50th birthday party at the Lanesborough Hotel in London on Thursday night, she may, like many children, have been hoping for something simple and guaranteed to please: cash.
By all accounts, she needs it. Birthdays may be a time to reflect, but as the Duchess tots up the accounts on her half-century, the figures make unpleasant reading.
In the last few months she has been pursued by four separate creditors, each after payments of thousands of pounds.
These are not the trifling sums that a scatter-brained former royal might overlook. After all, Sarah apparently once forgot to pay a seamstress who worked on her dresses £340, the price of taking in and letting out the waistlines as her weight yo-yoed.
Instead, these are claims for almost £20,000 from an accountancy firm, £1750 from lawyers, and more than £2,000 from photographers.
Most embarrassing of all was the claim from Richard Owen, a public relations consultant, who insisted that he was owed £17,536 for work on managing the Duchess's image in early spring this year. As she was musing over the placement at her party, Owen had launched a legal demand that sought to have its royal target declared bankrupt if she didn't pay up in three weeks. Happy Birthday Ma'am!
Whatever work Owen did, it is little wonder, in retrospect, that the Duchess felt "Brand Fergie" was in need of a bit of burnishing in February and March this year.
Only a few weeks earlier lawyers had moved in to wind up her American company, the saccharinely titled Hartmoor. At its launch she had once called it "a global inspirational lifestyle and wellness company".
{My emphasis}
In the end, however, it was to become the most high-profile financial casualty in a 12-month period that has become an economic annus horribilis for the former royal.
Hartmoor debts are estimated at £630,000, and though the Duchess has vowed to pay back creditors, lawyers says there is "a lot more work still to do".
It is not only Hartmoor's creditors and the Duchess's personal finances that have been hit by the company's reversal of fortune. She had originally intended that some of the profits generated there would be funnelled into the Sarah Ferguson Foundation, established in 2007 to, among other things, prevent obesity in children. But as Hartmoor crashed, its giving dwindled in 2007 to less than £15,000.
Those close to the Duchess say that Hartmoor woes are in part due to the global downturn, that it is another victim of a near unprecedented fiscal catastrophe that has been no respecter of propreitors' size or status.
But there are other versions, too, that hint that the company was not run well, that large salaries were dished out, fancy offices rented on Manhattan's Madison Avenue, and that Fergie, who owned 51 percent of the shares in Harwood, was more a figurehead than director, and as such failed to prevent the financial bleeding.
That would not have been a problem if she still had her contract with diet company Weightwatchers, which she was paid £2 million a year to promote.
But that ended in 2008, and now the girl from Dummer, Hampshire, is back in a quandary that has haunted her ever since she first started stepping out with the Queen's second, and favourite, son, a quarter of a century ago.
From the beginning she was accused of being a ghastly arriviste, whose garish manners were hardly in keeping with the formal royal style.
She was called a lot of things in her time. "Freebie Fergie" and "Duchess Do-Little" were two of the milder sobriquets bestowed on her in 40-point tabloid print.
| You can find the rest of this long-winded article here.
Looks like somebody's lifestyle was far too lavish for ones income. 
Last edited by MikeT; 23rd-October-2009 at 12:33 PM..
Reason: Formatting :(
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23rd-October-2009
