She used a prince’s multimillion-dollar proceeds from a real estate sale to buy herself a house, bought pricey jewelry with his money and transferred hefty sums out of one of his bank accounts.
But a former lawyer for Brunei’s Prince Jefri Bolkiah told a court Wednesday that all that was part of her job and getting paid for it — not theft, as the prince claims.
Jefri, the so-called “playboy prince” of one of the world’s richest royal families, says Faith Zaman Derbyshire and her husband, attorney Thomas Derbyshire, abused his trust to steal about $7 million from him. They say he owes them $12 million or more in fees and authorized everything they did.
Jefri, the youngest brother of Brunei’s Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah, is renowned for his opulent lifestyle — he once owned more than 2,000 cars and 600 properties, according to a Delaware court ruling.
He’s spent much of the past decade fighting with his brother’s government, which accused Jefri of embezzling nearly $16 billion from Brunei’s state coffers while he was its finance minister, nearly bankrupting the tiny country on the island of Borneo.
Jefri denied any wrongdoing but agreed in 2000 to repay money to Brunei’s investment arm. Amid years of ensuing disputes as the Brunei government pressed him to turn over promised assets, he hired the Derbyshires in 2004. Both were London-based barristers, a British term for lawyers.
Jefri testified last week that he gave them broad powers to handle his legal affairs and help run his businesses, and that he wasn’t aware until later that they used their authority to do such things as buy jewelry with his corporate credit cards.
On Friday, Faith Derbyshire calmly explained a series of transactions the prince is disputing.
She put $5 million from the sale of his Las Vegas ranch toward buying herself a home in Manhattan Beach, Calif., because Jefri told her to “bank the proceeds from the (sale) and use them to discharge the fees that he would pay to me under my retainer,” she said. The retainer amount is in dispute, but both sides say the prince agreed to pay the couple a total of at least 2 million British pounds (now about $3.1 million) a year.
A $100,000 transfer out of one of the prince’s bank accounts was either to pay expenses for one of his properties or reimburse money the couple had already advanced, she said. The Derbyshires ultimately fronted $500,000 for that property and got back only $200,000, she said.
And the $16,000 worth of watches — two Rolexes, one Cartier — she bought with the prince’s money weren’t for her or her husband, but for the royal family, she said.
“Prince Bahar (one of Jefri’s sons) asked me to buy the Cartier one for a particular lady,” she recalled.
The Derbyshires were fired in 2006. Jefri later sued them.
The trial is due to continue next week. It made tabloid headlines after word emerged earlier this month that the prince once kept sexually explicit, life-sized, custom-made statues at a Long Island estate that is part of the globe-trotting backdrop of the dispute.
But the judge has barred any mention of the statues during the trial.