Theirs is a rich, remarkable and sometimes sordid family story, veering from fortune-making genius to bigamy, bankruptcy and addiction.
But has any member of the Dunhill family – which was set on its way more than a century ago when Alfred Dunhill turned tobacco into gold – ever been jinxed in quite the manner that Piers Dunhill appears to be? An investigation has been launched into the disappearance of £12billion in which Vanja Megevand, the woman Dunhill has described as ‘my lawyer’, has become a person of interest to the French authorities.
This would appear the cruellest stroke of ill luck for Dunhill, 32, who, in the past two years, has inadvertently become entangled with two entrepreneurs who were not quite what they seemed.
Last year, I revealed Dunhill had been snapped, smiling broadly, in a New York bar, with jeweller Vashi Dominguez, just three months before the latter’s company became the subject of a winding-up order, after which it emerged that investors – Phones 4u billionaire John Caudwell among them – had lost £170million.
Dunhill was just as unlucky when attending roadshows for potential investors in 2024 alongside Renato Brioni – previously known, as I also disclosed, as Renato Libric, under which name he’d received a three-year prison sentence for wire fraud in the US in 2018 and been ordered to pay over $1.5million in compensation to those he’d defrauded.
The new case is obviously on an entirely different scale.
Every penny of the missing £12billion was, it’s alleged, fraudulently siphoned from a single individual, Nicolas Puech, a descendant of the founder of the luxury goods company Hermes.
French prosecutors are ‘pursuing probes’ into three Swiss lawyers ‘on preliminary charges of allegedly perpetrating an organised fraud’.
One of them is Vanja Megevand.
On social media, she’s thanked for contributing to ‘a week of festivities’ hosted by Dunhill’s firm, Dunhill Ventures, in the Hamptons, USA in 2024.
Megevand, in turn, in a later post, pays a personal thank you to Dunhill after a financial networking event in London.
I’m told that so well did Dunhill and Megevand bond, their relationship transcended professional barriers and became romantic – to the extent that Dunhill referred to the lawyer as his fiancee.
‘She was his girlfriend,’ I’m assured.
‘The engagement may not have been officially announced but everyone who met them was given to understand that they were engaged.’ Dunhill declines to comment.
Megevand’s lawyer tells me that she ‘strongly rejects the allegations’.
Helena pops out in her pyjamas Lingerie should not be confined to the bedroom, declares Helena Christensen, who wore a lacy bodysuit for a night out this week.
The model, 57, slipped into the £595 Coco de Mer number for the brand’s 25th anniversary....
