Who Killed the Playboy Earl?

Who Killed the Playboy Earl?
7 February 2008
Cutting Edge
Channel 4

When Anthony Ashley-Cooper, the 10th Earl of Shaftesbury, went missing from his luxury hotel in Cannes on 5 November 2004, it inspired a press frenzy that exposed a frothy mix of glamour, vice, drink, drugs and fallen aristocracy.

Wayward life

The press exposed the lifestyle of the 66-year old earl – 'Atty' to his friends – who held one of the most distinguished lineages in the country, but who had become an ageing, sex-obsessed adventurer, whose wayward life created passion and jealousy in his many lovers, and eventually a vicious rivalry that led to the Earl's sudden death.

Medallion-wearing lothario

This film tells the extraordinary story of the Earl's downfall – his transformation from the Eton-educated millionaire philanthropist, patron of the Owl Trust and heir to the great social reformer Lord Shaftesbury – into a medallion-wearing lothario with an insatiable appetite for young women who became lured into the ruthless demi-monde of 'hostess bars' on the French Riviera.

See the Channel 4 webpage about the programme, including an interview with producer Adrian Gatton about the making of the documentary, here.

Who Killed the Playboy Earl is an independent production for Channel 4 by Blast Films.

Director: Robert Davis
Producer: Adrian Gatton
Executive Producer: Grant McKee

The Money Programme: Dirty Little Secrets

Dirty Little Secrets: Four spy stories from the business world
1 February 2008
The Money Programme
on BBC2

The temptation to gain an illegal advantage on your business competitors has never been higher. Companies now routinely employ private detectives to find out just what their competitors are up to.

In the first of a new series, the Money Programme's Max Flint lifts the lid on a murky world of phone taps, secret filming, break-ins and deception - all in search of a profit.

Last year Formula 1 team, McLaren, was fined £50 million after it received details of a rival car's design.

The Money Programme discovers that far from the glamour of F1, many other businesses are also relying on dirty tricks to give them that extra advantage.

Dirty Little Secrets is an Old Street Films production for BBC2 Money Programme.

Producer: Adrian Gatton
Director: Rob Lemkin
Executive Editor: Clive Edwards

The Money Programme: Private Equity

The AA: Rescue or Wrong Turn?

8 June 2007

The Money Programme

on BBC Two

As private equity firms set their sights on bigger and bigger targets - including high-street favourites like Boots - the Money Programme looks at the City's new whizz kids and one of the most controversial business practices of recent times. The film examines the buy-out of the Automobile Association (AA) and asks whether private equity investors are saving or savaging this national institution.

Read an article about the programme here. The AA: Rescue or Wrong Turn? is an Old Street Films production for The Money Programme.

Co-Producer: Adrian Gatton

Producer/Director: Rob Lemkin
Executive Producer: Clive Edwards

The Aristo, a Workers' Revolt and the Missing Millions

The Aristo, a Workers' Revolt and the Missing Millions

By Keith Dovkants and Adrian Gatton

19 February 2006

Evening Standard (London)

The free-spending British heir to an ancient title is under investigation in Germany over a company he acquired

To his many friends on the polo circuit, the Hon Rhodri Philipps is the consummate owner-player. His team, Prodigal, often includes leading professional Jack Kidd, whose sister Jodie, the model, is an enthusiastic supporter. Philipps, heir to an ancient title and said to be a descendant of Richard the Lionheart, plays with attacking verve and, win or lose, is always dazzlingly generous with his hospitality.

Indeed, his free-spending has been noted far from the polo field. In the German town of Nuremberg a large number of unemployed workers have followed Philipps’s exploits very closely. There was the polo tournament on snow at Klosters last year, where Philipps fielded his team against world-class players, including Kidd. Jodie presented the trophy. Then there were the celebrity matches at Cowdray Park where Philipps played with some of polo’s stars including his friend Lucas White, who inherited £70 million from his father, the legendary entrepreneur Lord (Gordon) White. Led by Philipps, Prodigal won the Daniele de Winter cup. Lucas’s wife, Normandie Keith, was among the first to offer her congratulations.

Alas, Philipps’s sporting successes prompted a quite different reaction in Nuremberg. It was here, not so long ago, that a group of angry men stormed Philipps’s office, apparently intent on a confrontation. Only when the police arrived and Philipps was able to escape the scene in his car was calm restored.

Those who know him as the debonair 40-year-old heir to Viscount St Davids and the title Baron Strange de Knokyn (which dates from 1299) might be perplexed by the Nuremberg incident. Philipps is a popular figure in London, a regular at the Walbrook Club in the City and frequent patron of some of the capital’s finest restaurants and shops. James Purdey and Sons, the celebrated gun- maker in Mayfair, has done several thousand pounds worth of business with him recently His Wikipedia entry lists his hobbies as “polo, exclusive shopping”.

This has also been noted in Nuremberg. Workers at the old-established construction company Hans Brochier, which was taken over in a deal done by Philipps, claim his lavish spending habits have been financed by money that was meant to benefit them.

It seems an extraordinary thing to allege about a member of one of Britain’s noble families …

For full article please visit the Evening Standard online archive.

Is The Charming Mr Cherney Just One Oligarch Too Far?

Is The Charming Mr Cherney Just One Oligarch Too Far?
By Keith Dovkants and Adrian Gatton
6 December 2006
Evening Standard (London)

Banned from the US, dogged by Russian mafia rumours and facing fraud charges, this is the billionaire eyeing a mansion in London and a Premiership football club.

There was an especially disappointed fan amongst those watching Chelsea beat Levski Sofia 2-0 in the Champions League at Stamford Bridge last night. Billionaire business magnate Michael Cherney is Levki's honorary president and had dearly wanted to see his side giving Roman Abramovich's Blues a thrashing. Cherney and Abramovich have history. Until he Anglicised his name, Michael Cherney was Mikhail Chernoy, one of the last men standing when the smoke cleared after Russia's bloody Aluminium War in the 1990s.

He and Abramovich go back a long way, to the time when they both made colossal fortunes out of the wreckage of the old Soviet Union.

But while Abramovich settled in London with £7bn in the bank, buying a football club, a country house and various homes in Belgravia, Cherney (as we must now call him) has been unable to shake off the shadows of the old days. He is stalked constantly by allegations of links to the Russian mafia, his fortune was created during a violent business war and today he finds himself facing serious fraud charges.

Cherney, 54, would like to put all this behind him and, we can reveal, follow Abramovich's example by starting a new life in London. He is currently based in Israel, but he has been looking at one of the capital's most expensive homes, the Emir of Qatar's Beechwood House in Hampstead.

The property, set in 11-acres and guarded by a state-of-the-art security system, has been discreetly offered for sale at £65m. Cherney looked at it recently on a visit to London and is believed to consider it ideal, not least because it has extensive accommodation for staff, including, of course, bodyguards.

According to a reliable source Cherney has also consulted the football agent Pini Zahavi, about the possibility of buying a Premiership club. Unlike Abramovich, Cherney has had a lifelong passion for football. He turned Levski Sofia into a winning side when he bought the club and has pumped in millions of dollars. But difficulties with the Bulgarian authorities over business deals forced him to sell.

Officially, he is an honorary president, but insiders chuckle at this title, and it has been widely sugested that although he does not own the club on paper, in reality, he does ...

Full text of this two-page news feature article is available via the Evening Standard archive.

Polonium-Spuren bei Beresowski

Polonium-Spuren bei Beresowski
By Sabine Rennefanz
29 November 2006
Berliner Zeitung

LONDON - Es war ein überraschender Fund. Im Fall des ermordeten russischen Ex-Agenten Alexander Litwinenko hat Scotland Yard jetzt im Büro des Milliardärs Boris Beresowski Spuren der Substanz Polonium 210 gefunden ..

A German newspaper article analysing the death of the former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko, including an interview with Adrian Gatton about the poisoning, and how - breaking an historical truce - the rivalries of Russian oligarchs are now played out in London. The comments draw comparisons with the mysterious death of the Menatep/Yukos lawyer Stephen Curtis in a helicopter crash in Dorset in March 2004, who had allegedly become a police informant and had been receiving death threats shortly before he died.

Adrian Gatton first revealed the mysterious circumstances surrounding Stephen Curtis' death in a series of exclusive stories: see Mystery Crash (Channel 4 News, 24 April 2004); Russian tycoon's British lawyer was 'a police informant' (Independent on Sunday, 25 April 2004), Crash lawyer 'in fear of Russian spies' (30 April 2004), Russians apply to raid London offices of jailed Yukos oligarch (Independent on Sunday, 2 May 2004).

If you have any information at all on the death of Alexander Litvinenko and Stephen Curtis or related matters please email Adrian Gatton via this website.

The Susurluk Legacy

The Susurluk Legacy
By Adrian Gatton
Nov/Dec 2006
Druglink Magazine

Ten years ago, a horrific car accident grimly illuminated how Turkish state officials colluded with drug barons to traffic drugs into Europe and Britain. Adrian Gatton investigates how corruption has smoothed the path of heroin from Afghanistan into the UK.

ONE fateful evening, on November 3, 1996, a black Mercedes 600 pulled away from a plush Izmir hotel, and travelled towards Istanbul. Turkey’s roads are notoriously dangerous, and on the dark highway, near the town of Susurluk, the Mercedes smashed into an oncoming truck. Three of its four passengers died in the pile-up.

Photographs show blood-stained seats in a mangled wreck, the bonnet wrinkled-up and scorched by fire. Medics pulled out the bodies of an MP, a police chief, a beauty queen and her lover, a top Turkish gangster and hitman called Abdullah Catli. In the boot they found an assassin’s tools: pistols with silencers and machine guns, plus false diplomatic passports.

When the accident hit the papers, it emerged that Catli, a heroin trafficker on Interpol’s wanted list, was carrying a diplomatic passport signed by none other than the Turkish Interior Minister himself ...

Full article available via Druglink magazine (a publication of Drugscope) or text version available here.