Stephen Collins, the British entrepreneur and former host of the US TV series Property Envy, has been sued successfully by a City banker friend over a collapsed plan to open a boutique hotel in the south of France.
A Friendship and a Failed Property Venture
The 54-year-old businessman persuaded Karen Roberton, an executive at JP Morgan, to invest in his vision for a hotel in Portes-en-Valdaine, southeast France. The pair had originally met years earlier when Mr Collins was a development manager at The Ivy restaurant in Covent Garden, where Ms Roberton was a regular customer.
Their friendship remained platonic, even when Mr Collins briefly moved into her London home. In 2018, they met at Mr Collins's old school in Wimborne Minster, Dorset, and agreed to invest £1 million into converting a mid-century property.
To finance the deal, Ms Roberton took out a French mortgage of €655,000 (roughly £576,216) to buy the property and secured a second mortgage on her London home to fund the project's development.
Acrimonious Collapse and Legal Action
When the scheme stalled and their relationship soured, Mr Collins sent a series of hostile emails to Ms Roberton. In one, he called her a "liar and a cheat" and suggested she had a "'Square Mile' bubble, overpaid, under-talented lifestyle mindset."
As the partnership disintegrated, Ms Roberton wrote in December 2022 to end their business relationship, stating "the finances are exhausted" and proposing they sell the French property, where Mr Collins was living with his mother, and split any profits equally.
Mr Collins responded defiantly, stating: "I have no intention of ever meeting you again nor of being in the same room as you, unless compelled to do so, by a court."
High Court Ruling and Past Disputes
Last week, at London's High Court, Judge Richard Farnhill ruled in Ms Roberton's favour, officially dissolving their business partnership. The judge dismissed Mr Collins's claim that he was merely Ms Roberton's employee.
Judge Farnhill stated: "This partnership has failed beyond the point of no return. You cannot address your partner in the way that Mr Collins has repeatedly addressed Ms Roberton and expect to be able to work with them going forward." The judge also refused to allow Mr Collins to question Ms Roberton about emails of an 'explicitly sexual nature', deeming them irrelevant to the financial dispute.
This is not the first time Mr Collins has faced legal action from a former associate over a failed property venture. In 2019, he was ordered to repay £42,000 to his ex-partner, Camilla Simonsen, 61. She had given him the money to rent a luxury home in Kingston, southwest London, following the end of their romance, but later successfully sued to get the funds back.
Following the latest judgment, Ms Roberton said she bore no animosity, describing Mr Collins as "an amazing, creative human being" with a "wonderful eye for design." She added: "We went into a venture that did not work out and this is a nice clean break for both of us."
