_{Your yacht or mine?}

A former Linklaters partner has been ordered to pay back approximately £30m to a Saudi princess after he spent her cash on investments including a superyacht for his own use.

Ron Gibbs was the head of aviation and shipping at Linklaters until he left in 2006 to became a consultant to Saudi Arabia's HRH Prince Khaled.

The prince’s sister, HRH Princess Deema, transferred $25m to Gibbs in 2011 that she had been gifted by her late father, a Saudi defence minister, with instructions to invest it on her behalf.

Although the funds were originally earmarked for a property in Paris, Deema changed her mind and so instead Gibbs purchased a £17m superyacht, Elysium, in which he reportedly sailed around the world, bought a £3m apartment in the Regent Hotel in Porto, Montenegro, and invested in his own boatbuilding business, Silver Arrows Marine Group.

The Saudi royals terminated his consultancy via a settlement agreement in 2013 and asked Gibbs to transfer them the investments and any remaining cash. He didn’t, and when he still didn’t once a second settlement agreement was entered into in 2018, Deema sued and his assets were made subject to a worldwide freezing order.

The ex-Links partner used various means to stall for time. He claimed he was in the process of liquidating his investments, and that he couldn’t say where all the money had gone because he hadn’t kept sufficient records. Deputy Judge Mr Richard Salter KC said it was an assertion which “naturally invites a degree of scepticism”. 

Gibbs also claimed that the terms of his agreement meant Deema’s fortune could be invested in assets “for the personal benefit of Mr Gibbs [and] his family”.

Eventually his non-compliance with costs orders and his disclosure failings resulted in an order disbarring him from defending the underlying proceedings. 

But he still fought where he could. In 2023 Deema sought to force the sale of a £3.5m house in Richmond-on-Thames owned by Gibbs, to claw back money she was owed pursuant to interim costs orders made against the lawyer.

Gibbs, who was renting the property for £6,500 a month, represented himself alongside his ex-wife, who was also a defendant, and claimed the house wasn’t his to sell as he had transferred the property to other family members via an unregistered deed of trust.

When Deema’s lawyers at Quinn Emmanuel asked him to produce the deed he told them that he had "led a long and busy life, living and working in multiple jurisdictions around the world", and "did not trail around with him a truck load of documents on the off chance one day he would be asked for a piece of paper”.

His ex-wife was just as impressive. She claimed that there was no contemporaneous correspondence about the deed, that the laptop and printer used to produce it no longer existed, that there were no drafts, that the witness couldn’t be contacted as she had died, and that no-one else knew about it because Gibbs was an experienced solicitor who drafted the document without assistance.

In a bravura move, Gibbs then claimed to have accidentally shredded the deed. He told Quinn Emmanuel, "Two weeks ago I took all original trust deeds in my possession to a local solicitor to have certified copies made. I also took copies of the documents with me, but the solicitor concerned preferred to make his own copies which he then certified. When I returned home I destroyed the unnecessary copies and I realise now I must have destroyed the originals by mistake. I have been so careful with the original documents as they could easily be mistaken for copies, so I am devastated that I have made such an error and as a result have lost all of the original trust deeds." 

Ordering him to sell the house, the judge concluded that Gibbs had made the whole thing up and said that his conduct was “reprehensible and a wholesale abuse of process”.

Now Gibbs has been ordered to repay the original $25m, plus compound interest of 9% per year since 2018. 

Mr Justice Calver said that “Mr Gibbs has done everything he possibly could to avoid returning these funds to the claimant and his behaviour has been reprehensible”. 

His dodges included claiming he was in Spain to avoid being served with papers, an assertion undermined by video which showed him “somewhat comically seeking to evade service by running off down the road”.

Gibbs told the court he had been “ruined” and reduced to fighting the case by himself with a laptop and a £50 printer, and working as a boat captain.

“You can't get blood out of a stone. There is no point asking me to pay funds I don't have”, he reportedly said, adding that, “If I didn't have an old age pension, I would have struggled to pay the Tube fare today. My small laptop is basically all I have”.

It's unlikely the ex-Links partner will ever get to cruise the Azores in Elysium again, but he can always come back to RollOnFriday and remember when he granted Boat International a tour of 'his' customised Sunseeker 131.

“I like driving the boat myself, and I like being in the open air", he told the magazine. "I didn’t want to be in the same situation as with the Sunseeker 115, where you have to run between the sundeck and the bridge.” A flaw familiar to many of ROF's readers.

Gibbs' list of custom features was "long and detailed, with a first draft extending to 120 pages", he said. By the end of the build, "they were on version 11 of the document". You can take the partner out of the Magic Circle...

“If you’re going to do overnight cruises, do not put your master cabin in the bow”, said Gibbs. “In my configuration, it is so stable and so quiet. You also have your own private deck behind you."  

"In the morning it’s great, too: into the gym, then straight to the shower, change.”

Gibbs didn't allow hot meals onboard as “Trying to get cooking smells out of a boat with curtains is very difficult. It ages a boat very quickly”.

“Then there’s the time it takes to get food on board and waste off. And however good your chef is, after two weeks on board, you become pretty bored with what they do". Completely. One lobster ravioli a fortnight is quite enough, thank you.

"This is one of my favourite places,” he said of the upholstered spot beneath the custom parasol at the bow. “Sitting on the edge of the foredeck, out of the wind.”

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