After a five-month trial in Leeds, UK, the bankrupt socialite and former art collector James Stunt was found not guilty of taking part in a £266m money-laundering operation. He was accused, along with four other co-defendants, of washing “dirty” cash through their companies to buy gold, which was shipped to Dubai and sold there.
The case was initially heard in 2022 but the jury failed to reach a verdict, and it was retried in March this year.
The four other men—Gregory Frankel, 47, Daniel Rawson, 47, Haroon Rashid, 54, and Arjun Babber, 32—were convicted in the same trial: only Rawson was present in court, and the other three are believed to have fled the country.
The prosecution argued that Stunt’s office in London was used to launder cash; he built a gold refinery at Sheffield Assay Office to turn scrap gold into ingots, which is how, he said, he met the other four men. In court he claimed he had no idea he was entering into a criminal conspiracy with them, although his company, Stunt & Co, took 70% of the profits from the scheme.
Stunt always denied the charges. He was previously the husband of the heiress Petra Ecclestone, daughter of Formula 1 boss Bernie Ecclestone, and notorious for his gambling and highly ostentatious lifestyle. He was also at one point a prominent and aggressive collector of British portraiture, notably by Peter Lely and Anthony van Dyck, and lent a group of his early Lelys to the Courtauld Institute in 2012.
In 2017 he sent 17 paintings to Dumfries House in Scotland, now owned by King Charles III’s charitable foundation; in 2022 The Art Newspaper questioned the authenticity of a number of paintings by Van Dyck owned by Stunt, and authenticated by Malcolm Rogers, the former director of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.
However, after his 2017 divorce, Stunt was eventually declared bankrupt. In 2024 he tried to claim that a Van Dyck double portrait, The Cheeke Sisters: Essex, Countess of Manchester and Anne, Lady Rich, painted around 1640, belonged to his father Geoffrey and so should not be included in his estate. But the insolvency and companies court judge Clive Jones dismissed his suit.
The Dumfries House loans is the subject of a film, The Royal Stunt, directed by Kief Davidson and due to be released this year. It was made after an intensive three-year investigation but the release was delayed pending the result of the Stunt trial.
