At £158 a month, full membership of the Hogarth Health Club in Chiswick, west London, doesn’t come cheap, but it does boast tennis courts, a pool, gym, dance studios, beauty clinic and a bar, all set in “two acres of beautifully maintained grounds just off the Chiswick High Road”, according to the group’s website.
What’s not included in the subscription fee, or indeed the marketing literature, is the Hogarth Group’s sideline as a base for shell companies set up and often owned and controlled by Malcolm Grumbridge, a long-term family friend and lawyer to the Maxwell family.
Grumbridge was fined and agreed to leave the legal profession in December after admitting “reckless” conduct related to a remarkable litany of failings such as breaches of money laundering and terrorist financing rules, including an admission he risked “facilitating dubious transactions that could have led to money laundering”.
An investigation by The Times lays bare the key role Grumbridge, 68, has played at the heart of the Maxwells’ opaque finances, setting up and owning companies on behalf of the brothers Kevin and Ian Maxwell and registered to the same address as The Hogarth Group on Airedale Avenue. Grumbridge is also linked to the financial affairs of Ghislaine Maxwell, 59 — currently in a New York jail awaiting trial for alleged sex trafficking linked to her former partner Jeffrey Epstein — and even the business affairs of accountants hired to run the rule over her wealth.
Grumbridge qualified as a solicitor in 1978 and is a former partner at the law firm Lewis Silkin. A source with knowledge of the family’s affairs said Grumbridge’s relationship with the Maxwells goes all the way back to Robert Maxwell, who died in 1991 after going overboard from his yacht, Lady Ghislaine, off the Canary Islands, after which it emerged that the media baron had been looting the Mirror Group pension scheme to prop up his failing empire.
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A spokesman for the Maxwell brothers said they had been working with Grumbridge since the early 1990s.
According to Companies House records, Grumbridge has been director of at least 150 companies. More than 120 of the directorships are either resigned or dissolved. Many of the companies registered to the address and run by Grumbridge, such as “management consultancies” Anglo Kazakh Capital and African Global Energy and the food service firm Rass and Berry, show little or no trading activity.
However, the agreement published by the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) calls into question the accuracy of information he filed about supposedly non-trading entities. Investigators found returns submitted to HM Revenue & Customs indicating that a business of which Grumbridge was the director was dormant “whereas client ledgers indicated that the company was active during that specific period”.
Serious failings at M C Grumbridge, the one-man firm he ran from The Hogarth Group, included inaccurate accounts, inter-client loans made without proper authorisation and making cash withdrawals from the firm’s client bank account.
There were due diligence failings on certain payments and he failed to keep proper records, check the source of funds or verify the true identity of clients before commencing business. Conflicts of interest failures included acting for “two brothers simultaneously with one file and one client ledger” and representing a company of which Grumbridge was a co-director.
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The SRA declined to reveal the identity of the brothers and a spokesman for the Maxwells did not comment on the possibility this was a reference to Ian and Kevin. The SRA indicated it had passed details of Grumbridge’s misconduct to unspecified third party investigation agencies.
Grumbridge agreed to pay a £2,000 fine and £1,350 of SRA costs. The authority said his misconduct was so serious it could have warranted a penalty of up to £50,000, but it took into account Grumbridge’s agreement to leave the profession, mitigation such as assistance he gave to investigators and his health issues.
A spokesman for the Maxwells said that Grumbridge was Ian and Kevin Maxwell’s solicitor for “many years from the early 1990s”. “He also acted on property matters for Ghislaine. He informed Kevin and Ian in the summer of 2018 of his decision to retire but remains a friend of the family. They have no comment about the agreement between him and the SRA.”
Grumbridge remains a director of The Hogarth Group, which he joined when it was established in 1993. The group acts as holding company for a health club with more than 2,000 members. It also has about £10 million worth of investment properties. Grumbridge has continued to register new companies during his retirement.
Kevin Maxwell, 62, became Britain’s biggest bankrupt with debts of £400 million in 1992 related to the Mirror scandal, and was banned from running a company for eight years in 2011 after he and two others diverted £2 million from a construction company in the run-up to its failure. Last year, he returned to business for the first time in a decade, as a director of a business called Avenue Partners Developments, a real estate company set up by Grumbridge in 2019 and initially registered to The Hogarth Group. Grumbridge resigned in January this year, the month after his agreement with the SRA, transferring ownership to Kevin.
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Hogarth-based MC Grumbridge was listed on the Land Registry as having “care of” Ghislaine Maxwell’s mews house in Belgravia, where the Duke of York was photographed with his arm around Virginia Roberts, a victim of Epstein. A spokesman for Ghislaine said the house had now been sold.
The asset would have been included when Macalvins, a firm based in Harrow, Middlesex, was hired to produce the financial report on Ghislaine’s finances that was used in a failed attempt to convince the American courts she was coming clean about her wealth.
Filings show that two Macalvins shareholders had a pre-existing relationship with Grumbridge, Ghislaine’s property advisor, at the time. In September 2016, Grumbridge transferred his stake in a property company called Eightways Estates to Plutus Estates, a business owned by Macalvins shareholders Shailesh Patel and Pankaj Rajani.
A source close to Ghislaine indicated Macalvins was used in the US legal proceedings as it already had background knowledge of her finances. Asked about its relationship with the Maxwells’ then lawyer, a Macalvins spokesman said: “We have robust processes in place to ensure we comply with our regulatory and legal obligations. These obligations mean we cannot comment on matters relating to specific individuals.”
Grumbridge and The Hogarth Group declined to comment.
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Failed holiday firm
Malcolm Grumbridge has been a mysterious figure during his more than four-decade legal and business career. Beyond occasional passing mentions in the press related to the Maxwells, the Goldtrail affair is the only episode that has previously thrust him into the spotlight.
The Turkish holiday operator was put into administration by its sole director and shareholder, Abdulkadir Aydin, in 2010, leaving tens of thousands stranded overseas and resulting in £20 million in repatriation costs for the Air Travel Trust. Aydin was disqualified as a director for 15 years in 2013 after the High Court heard he received £4 million in “commission” before the collapse and paid out £6.3 million to companies owned by his family.
Some of the payments involved secret share sale agreements involving a Hong Kong investment company founded by Grumbridge.
Goldtrail associates Phil Wyatt, Magnus Stephensen and Halldor Sigurdarson were found to have given dishonest assistance to Aydin in a 2017 civil action brought by Goldtrail’s liquidators. A further civil action from liquidators to recover funds from Grumbridge failed in June because it was out of time.
Liquidators had hoped new documents which came to light related to Grumbridge’s involvement in the transactions would allow him to be pursued. These included an email exchange between Grumbridge and Stephensen in which the latter asked about possible claims against Aydin including money laundering. Grumbridge replied: “We could become involved as co-conspirators!”
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Rejecting an appeal from liquidators with “some reluctance”, Mr Justice Adam Johnson said the “essential facts put Grumbridge firmly in the frame” for having provided dishonest assistance to Aydin but that the case against him should have been pleaded with the original fraud claim.
Other associates of the lawyer linked at one point to the health group have included Wellesley, the troubled peer-to-peer and minibond investment firm, and the late German aristocrat Count Gottfried von Bismarck who died of a cocaine overdose in 2007.
