Court tells Porter to reveal transactions as £37m is frozen
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Your support makes all the difference.The worldwide hunt for Dame Shirley Porter's fortune received a huge boost yesterday when the High Court froze £37m of her assets and demanded details of her financial transactions since 1994.
The Tesco heiress and former leader of Westminster City Council was ordered to pay a record political fine when the House of Lords found her guilty in the "homes for votes" affair. But Dame Shirley, once estimated be worth £69m, stunned investigators last year when she claimed she had assets of only £300,000 and gave no clue why the figure was so small.
Yesterday, Westminster City Council succeeded in widening existing court orders against her, increasing from £33m to £37m the amount of her worldwide assets that can be frozen.
The new freezing and disclosure orders issued by the High Court mean the council's debt recovery and legal teams can now try to trace Dame Shirley's fortune. She has been given one week to explain where the cash has gone.
The House of Lords ruled in 2001 that Dame Shirley tried to gerrymander the 1986 local elections by selling to Tory voters flats intended for the homeless. In a scathing judgment, the law lords concluded she was guilty of unprecedented "political corruption".
She was originally ordered to pay £27m, yet despite the combined efforts of the High Court, law lords, auditors, solicitors, debt-recovery experts and private investigators, Dame Shirley has not paid a penny of the fine.
Yesterday the High Court varied the order against her to include "all assets which she has the power (directly or indirectly, jointly or singularly) to dispose of or deal with as if they were her own". This includes, crucially, assets held under trusts, nominee companies or similar arrangements used to hold and manage assets, in accordance with her instructions.
She has also been ordered to identify and provide full details to Westminster City Council's solicitors of any transactions, such as transfers, worth more than £100,000 in relation to her assets from 1 January 1994 to date. The deadline for this further disclosure is 18 February.
It is claimed that she transferred the majority of her Tesco shares in 1994 and 1995 and has directed much of her money to charitable foundations in the name of herself and her husband Sir Leslie Porter. Although Dame Shirley did not consent to the application, she chose not to be represented at the hearing. Westminster won its court costs of £20,000.
Colin Wilson, head of legal services at Westminster, said: "We are obviously pleased that this gives us the opportunity to assess what the prospects are of recovering the surcharge."
Murad Qureshi, Labour's finance spokesman on the council, said the new order was "great news" for the residents of Westminster.
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