The billionaire Candy brothers have faced accusations in the high court of blackmail, extortion and intimidation, as former business partners and once close advisers prepared to give evidence against them in a £132m claim for damages.

The case, which has reached trial after a year of legal wrangling, is being brought by the entrepreneur Mark Holyoake, whose reputation was dented after the collapse of his fish importing business, British Seafood, six years ago.

Christian and Nick Candy, best known as the creators of the luxury One Hyde Park apartment complex in Knightsbridge, central London, are embroiled in a bitter and costly battle in which millions has already been spent on private investigators, public relations advisers and a small army of solicitors and QCs.

Holyoake, a university friend of Nick Candy, is suing the brothers and their CPC Group property business in a dispute over a £12m loan. The money was provided in October 2011 to help fund Holyoake’s project at Grosvenor Gardens House, a 42-apartment mansion block in Victoria, central London.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Mark Holyoake, who is suing the Candy brothers for £132m. He received a loan of £12m in October 2011 to help fund a property project. Photograph: YouTube

Opening the proceedings on Wednesday, Roger Stewart QC – for the claimant, said Holyoake was pressured into repaying £37m and pulling out of the development, losing £100m in potential profits by selling it before completion.

In his legal claim, Holyoake says his business interests, reputation, and personal and family life were threatened in a series of exchanges. He alleges that Christian Candy told him during a meeting at CPC’s offices in Guernsey he would “take a wrecking ball to his life”, and call his lenders “with the purpose of ruining him” unless Holyoake handed over the keys to the Grosvenor property.



Holyoake claims that Christian Candy told him during a phone call “you need to think about your pregnant wife” and that he would “feel terrible if anything were to go wrong during the pregnancy for her or the baby”.

The finger was also pointed at Nick Candy, who is married to the singer Holly Valance, with claims he threatened that his brother would sell the debt to “certain people, potentially Russians”, who would “not think twice about hurting” Holyoake or his family. Holyoake’s wife, Emma, is scheduled to give evidence over the coming weeks.

Outlining the case, Stewart claimed that his client was subjected by the Candys to “a long-running, highly unpleasant and malicious campaign of threats, abuse, intimidation and coercion directed at himself and his family. This included threats to the physical wellbeing of Mark Holyoake, his pregnant wife and their unborn child”.

The purpose of this, Stewart said in his opening submission, was to obtain Grosvenor Gardens House at an “undervalue” and “extort very significant sums of money” from him. Their actions, he said, amounted to “blackmail”.

Holyoake claims that soon after borrowing money from Christian Candy, he was accused of lying about his assets and put under pressure to rapidly repay the sum or hand over the keys to the development. He alleges “extortion”, saying he was pushed into signing a series of agreements with the Candys that were harmful to his interests.

The Candys deny the charges “in their entirety”. In their defence statement, they allege “serial dishonesty and fraud on the part of Mr Holyoake and his associates”, and that the Grosvenor project was developed “on dishonest foundations with other people’s money”.

They say he commenced the development without any certainty on how it would be funded, that he “consistently lied about his assets” and defaulted on the terms of the loan. Both brothers, accompanied by CPC executives, were present on the opening day of the trial.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The singer Holly Valance and Nick Candy attend an evening of Studio 54 at the Dorchester in London. Photograph: David M Benett/Getty Images

Individuals previously close to the Candys have come forward to join 11 witnesses prepared to take the stand in support of Holyoake. They include the former interim chief executive of Candy & Candy, Clive Hyman – who worked for the brothers in 2005 after leaving KPMG, where he was a partner. Also lined up is the banker William Pym, who advised Christian Candy while working at Credit Suisse and later in his own advisory firm, and was so close to the property magnate that he attended his stag party.

Ian Roberts, the founder of technology startup Crowdmix, is to break a six-month silence over the collapse of his venture in order to give evidence. Roberts was ousted from his company, in which Nick Candy was the largest investor, weeks before it filed for bankruptcy. Candy then bought the company, which was set up to create a music sharing app, taking it out of administration.

The evidence from Roberts would support the allegations of blackmail, Stewart said.

“Mr Roberts will give evidence relating to Nick Candy’s involvement in Crowdmix, in particular how Nick Candy sought to obtain Crowdmix at an undervalue via unlawful means,” Stewart alleged. “Mr Roberts’s evidence will seek to show the propensity of Nick Candy to engage in the conduct that is alleged by claimants in these proceedings.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A Crowdmix promotional video

With well-known investors ranging from the DJs Danny Rampling and Pete Tong, to the Goldman Sachs investment banking chief Anthony Gutman, Crowdmix employed 160 staff in London and Los Angeles at its peak. It collapsed last summer in a blaze of publicity after burning through £14m without launching its app to the general public.

In a 103-page written submission, Stewart said the financier Jonathan Arnst would also give evidence, alleging that the brothers attempted to “destabilise” Holyoake’s relationship with his employer Investec bank.

Stewart said emails uncovered in disclosure proceedings before the trial appear to show that Christian Candy discussed “stealing” Grosvenor Gardens from Holyoake. They suggest that Christian Candy attempted to purchase Holyoake’s loan from Investec, which had underwritten the project. In March 2012, Christian Candy wrote: “Once we buy this loan, we may want to call default under this loan agreement also ... I think CPC can steal this site of MH [Mark Holyoake] if we are clever.”

Holyoake’s case has also drawn in the controversial private investigator Cliff Knuckey. A former Metropolitan police detective, who went on to run his own investigations firm, Knuckey was allegedly ordered by a Candy manager to obtain criminal record checks on Holyoake and an associate. Knuckey’s clients have included the former Nigerian state governor James Ibori, who was jailed in 2012 for a £50m fraud.

Holyoake has no criminal record and he alleges that the search amounted to unlawful processing of his personal data.

The defendants began setting out their case before the judge, Christopher Nugee, on Wednesday.

On behalf of the Candys, Tim Lord QC dismissed the allegations of blackmail and intimidation, describing the case in essence as “just a debtor-creditor dispute of the sort that play out in the county courts every day”.



In the 75 files gathered for the case, he said Holyoake had been unable to produce a single document proving that he and his family were physically threatened. “The documents don’t give any support to the allegations at all and that is because they have been invented,” Lord said.

The case continues.

● This article was amended on Thursday 9 February. It had stated incorrectly that the Candy brothers were accompanied at the high court by bodyguards.