Nigella Lawson and Charles Saatchi ‘unconcerned by credit card bills’
Accountant tells court he did not share concerns about assistants’ spending with couple as he felt they were trivial
Charles Saatchi and Nigella Lawson considered monthly credit card bills of tens of thousands of pounds run up by their assistants to be “trivial matters”, with Saatchi becoming concerned only when the sums reached an average of £76,000 (HK$961,426) a month, a court has been told.
Francesca and Elisabetta Grillo, two of five of the couple’s assistants to have company credit cards, were averaging bills of £48,000 and £28,000 a month respectively when their spending first began to cause alarm, the art dealer’s finance director, Rahul Gajjar, told a jury at Isleworth crown court in west London.
The two sisters are accused of spending £685,000 of the celebrity couple’s money, which the crown alleges they spent on designer clothes, flights and five-star hotels. They deny fraud.
Gajjar told the court that he had confronted Francesca Grillo, 35, in July 2012 with a copy of her company credit card bill for the previous month, which ran to 15 pages and totalled more than £64,336.97.
While some purchases had been on behalf of the Saatchi and Lawson family, he said, Grillo had acknowledged that she had spent more than £34,000 on luxury goods for herself.
