The exiled prince of Brunei, accused of squandering the wealth of his tiny Southeast Asian homeland, sued two Britons in a US court on Friday, saying they bilked him out of millions of dollars through property scams.
Prince Jefri, who counts the Palace Hotel in New York among his personal assets and once used Brunei's money to buy gold-plated toilet brushes, claims Faith Zaman and her husband, Thomas William Derbyshire, conned him by "posing as English lawyers."
The younger brother of Brunei's ruling monarch hired the pair as attorneys in 2004, paying them $1 million a year, and Zaman then assumed several high-level positions in companies in charge of Jefri's vast real estate holdings, according to the lawsuit filed in US District Court in Manhattan.
In 2005, Zaman and Derbyshire sold Jefri's 28-acre (11-hectare) estate on Long Island - then valued at $26 million - to another defendant in the suit, Westfields Invest Limited LLC, for $11.8 million, but the money was never transferred to the prince, the prince alleges.
Zaman and Derbyshire also are accused of diverting $5 million of the prince's money from a real estate sale to buy a Manhattan Beach, California, property for $2.2 million. Zaman, 30, became managing director of the Palace Hotel in February, and Jefri accuses her of setting up a fake London company from which the hotel bought $4 million worth of plasma-screen television sets. The suit says she sent the money to her bank account in Monaco.
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