Court case of the week

Rodney Whiston-Dew, a former lawyer currently serving a ten-year prison sentence for “cheating the taxman”,(pictured, left, with daughter Allegra) for allegedly swindling her out of more than £2m, writes Jonathan Ames in The Times. The Baroness told the High Court that Whiston-Dew, 70, had persuaded her to invest in a Seychelles-based trust in 2011 and 2012, but that she never saw her money again. Whiston-Dew was jailed in 2017 for being one of “five Eton and Oxbridge-educated businessmen who conned celebrities and others” into putting millions into a fake “green” investment scheme. In 2019, he was ordered to pay back more than £3m or face having his sentence extended. Van Zuylen, who court papers describe as “financially unsophisticated”, will take her claims to a full trial later this year.