Divorcee evicted from Charles Dickens's £19m mansion
A multimillionaire divorcee has been ordered out of her historic £19m London mansion, which was once home to Charles Dickens.
Deborah Fiorentino, a former estate agent who specialised in luxury properties, was sued after she failed to pay the mortgage on her Grade-I listed Regent's Park home.
Dickens lived at the Hanover Terrace mansion in 1861 when he wrote Great Expectations, a tale of a blacksmith's apprentice who enters into high society after inheriting an unexpected fortune.
Ms Fiorentino, the former wife of both Italian aristocrat Giovanni Fiorentino and celebrity British divorce lawyer Raymond 'Jaws' Tooth, ran up the massive arrears after taking out a £17.85m loan on the seven-bed house, as well as a separate mews house and a third property in Hampstead.
The Luxembourg-based private bank Banque Havilland sued Ms Fiorentino to gain possession of the house, claiming she was simply unable to cover the cost of the mortgage which she had stopped paying in December 2022.
Judge Nicholas Parfitt, sitting at Mayor's and City County Court, said Ms Fiorentino had made it clear that the house was her 'only asset' and that she was not going to make any more installments.
Designed by Buckingham Palace and Marble Arch neo-classical architect John Nash, the mansion was recently renovated to feature its own gym and sauna.
Ms Fiorentino married Italian aristocrat Giovanni Fiorentino, father of her two children, in the early 1990s and lived with him between his two family homes in Naples.
She purchased a house in Hampstead which belonged to pioneer plastic surgeon Sir Harold Gillies, while her former home in Frognal, also in Hampstead, was where stars including Peter Sellers and Elizabeth Taylor enjoyed garden parties in the 1960s.
In 2008, she separated from her second husband, a top divorce lawyer called Raymond 'Jaws' Tooth who worked on the divorces of Roman Abramovich, Jude Law, Michael Barrymore and Colin Montgomerie.
Michael Walsh KC, representing Banque Havilland, said in court last week that Ms Fiorentino was 'supposedly a high net worth individual' but had now shown herself unable to pay her debts.
She sold her home in Frognal for just over £11m, allowing the proceeds to pay down the loan, but was still left owing over £10.2m, with the debt growing by almost £2,000 per day, said the barrister.
Thomas Rothwell, representing Ms Fiorentino, claimed the bank had taken an 'unnecessarily belligerent attitude' against her and that she had been 'treated unreasonably.'
He said she had been prevented from refinancing her loan, costing her millions in extra outgoings and interest, meaning the amount she owes should be reduced by at least £2.45m, meaning at the most she only now owes around £7.81m.
Judge Parfitt said her case against the bank could not be decided now and that, 'the law is well established that the granted security rights take precedence over the cause of action.'
He said: 'The defendant has made clear that her only asset is Hanover and so she has no means of making any payments to the bank other than through a sale of Hanover or refinancing Hanover.'
Ms Fiorentino claimed several times to be close to selling the mansion, including once to an unnamed Premier League footballer, but a sale had not got to contract exchange.
The judge said of her near sale claims: 'At best it is a sequence of hoped for sales which never come close to being a substantial likelihood.
'At worse it is generating evidence to resist the consequences of her legal position arising from the financial documents and her defaults, including at its most basic and uncontroversial failing to repay at the end of the term.'
The judge however granted Ms Fiorentino a three-month stay of execution so that she can make a last ditch effort to sell her historic house before it is repossessed.
He ordered that she otherwise must give up possession of the house to the bank by 4pm on August 21.
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