by Mark Seal, Vanity Fair
For six weeks, starting last November 8, in the Supreme Court of the State of New York, in Manhattan, the two sides in a most unusual trial presented equally outlandish stories. The plaintiff, Prince Jefri Bolkiah, Brunei’s notorious royal playboy, who has probably gone through more cash than any other human being on earth, tried to convince the jury that he was extremely naïve when it came to financial matters. He claimed that he never signed checks and that his business affairs had been managed entirely by four private secretaries and a coterie of advisers and attorneys, who ran his estimated 250 companies and all his other concerns.
For six weeks, starting last November 8, in the Supreme Court of the State of New York, in Manhattan, the two sides in a most unusual trial presented equally outlandish stories. The plaintiff, Prince Jefri Bolkiah, Brunei’s notorious royal playboy, who has probably gone through more cash than any other human being on earth, tried to convince the jury that he was extremely naïve when it came to financial matters. He claimed that he never signed checks and that his business affairs had been managed entirely by four private secretaries and a coterie of advisers and attorneys, who ran his estimated 250 companies and all his other concerns.
By casting himself in that light, Prince Jefri, 56, hoped to make the jury believe that two of his own lawyers, Faith Zaman and Thomas Derbyshire, the attractive British husband-and-wife team sitting at the defense table, had ripped him off to the tune of a reported $23 million. This wasn’t necessarily a bad strategy, because soon it seemed that only a simpleton would not have noticed the blatant chicanery he was accusing these attorneys of committing.“Numerous acts of theft and deception, self-dealing, embezzlement and fraud, all designed to benefit themselves and their family members,” read the prince’s original complaint, filed in federal court in December 2006. He charged the couple with arranging a fraudulent sale of his mansion on Long Island’s exclusive North Shore at a cut-rate price, with depositing a $5 million check paid to one of his companies into the account of a “cloned” company under their control in the Cayman Islands, and with putting improper personal expenses—totaling more than $650,000—on company credit cards. After the prince installed the then 29-year-old Zaman as managing director of one of his hotels, the New York Palace, in 2006, she proceeded, according to him, to award herself an exorbitant contract ($2.5 million a year), sign herself to dirt-cheap, long-term leases on a luxury apartment in the hotel and the steak house on the ground floor, and hire her inexperienced brother as a systems analyst. “The words ‘Faithless servants’ do not do justice to the scope of their perfidy,” read Prince Jefri’s complaint.
The lawyers for the defendants attempted in turn to show the jury that Jefri was not a financial simpleton at all but “an unabashed and unreformed serial liar,” charged with stealing $14.8 billion from Brunei when he served as its finance minister, from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s. The defendants claimed that he had used his stolen billions to finance a 10-year orgy of extravagance and deceit, which culminated only when his brother the Sultan of Brunei set out to recover the fortune Jefri had supposedly hidden. The lawyers argued that Zaman and Derbyshire had stolen nothing, and that the prince’s charges against them were part of an elaborate scheme to funnel money through them in all manner of nefarious ways to fuel his insatiable need for cash. The defense lawyers also claimed that Jefri had stiffed Zaman and Derbyshire for millions in salaries and travel expenses, then fired them when they finally refused to comply with his increasing illegal demands.
I studied the diminutive prince on the witness stand, with his dark business suit, swept-back hair, and copper complexion. As he testified—for the first time in a courtroom—there was no hint of the high-flying Jefri whose well-publicized expenses had once been estimated at $50 million a month. In his place was a rather ordinary man, shy and uncomfortable, reduced to sharing courthouse hallways with reporters and being chaperoned by a representative of the sultan. “Good morning, Prince Jefri,” I said to him every day. “Good morning,” he always replied. Once, he asked me about the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade.
In his testimony, he gave only the briefest answers. “I think so,” he responded in a falsetto voice when asked if he had attorneys spread all over the world. “Just visit there,” he said to describe his duties at a Hong Kong shipping company, one of the many concerns from which he received a salary. “There is a lot,” he answered when asked how many companies were in his name. “I own them; I do not run them,” he added. “So who ran the companies?” he was asked. “Professional lawyers that I appointed.”
In stark contrast to the subdued prince were the defendants: Zaman, a 34-year-old, effervescent beauty, her fine figure packed into smart business outfits, and her husband, 43, who spoke with a Liverpool accent and appeared almost every day in a different bespoke suit and silk pocket foulard. Losing this case would bankrupt them and destroy their reputations. If the jury found for the prince, the attorneys representing him would seize everything they owned. Nevertheless, they smiled, laughed, shook their heads at things they didn’t agree with, and seemed ready and eager to get on the stand and tell their story.
Someone had to be lying, and for weeks the jury tried to decide who that was. “In its way, this case begins like a fairy tale,” Jefri’s lawyer Linda Goldstein, a fast-talking whippet of a New York City litigator, told the jury in her opening argument. “Once upon a time there was a prince. His name was Prince Jefri Bolkiah.”
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