The bitter battle tearing a London dynasty apart

Warring heirs and a cross-continent litigation conflict Jonathan Prynnon the extraordinary legal war dividing one of London’s richest families

- Jonathan Prynnon

IT is the modern-day version of Charles Dickens’s interminable Victorian probate case, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, that was the gloomy backdrop to his classic novel Bleak House. But this 21st-century legal war of attrition involves members of the same immensely wealthy London family — including the owner of Britain’s biggest private contemporary art collection and the Mayfair building that houses Scott’s restaurant — who are locked in the litigation equivalent of hand-to-hand combat in courtrooms on three continents.

Yet remarkably, despite already dragging on for 11 years with no sign of an end, hardly anything has been written about the bitter conflict splitting the publicity-shy Salem dynasty.

Hostilities are set to flare up again at the High Court in London in the autumn in this hugely-complicated and desperately sad family saga. There are few winners, except, with estimated legal fees already approaching £10 million, the lawyers. As one person involved in the proceedings put it: “It is warfare on all fronts.” The story’s origins date to the Thirties when Moussa Salem started a money changing business in Beirut. His four sons, Freddy, Beno, Isaac and Raymond, joined the family firm in the Sixties and Seventies when it branched out into providing export finance for textile traders in Nigeria.

After civil war broke out in Lebanon in 1975 the family fled to London. Their breakthrough came when a family business won the lucrative contract to be the sole distributor of the cigarettes of British American Tobacco (BAT), the multi-national behind the Rothmans, Pall Mall and Benson & Hedges brands, in west Africa's biggest economy. Their tobacco sales account for an estimated 70 per cent of cigarettes sold in Nigeria.