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R/£ Sapersteins square up for the most expensive divorce in history
April 23, 2006 Edition 1
David Usborne
New York - A Swedish-born beauty and mother of three who was unceremoniously dumped by her multibillionaire husband last summer on board the family's Gulfstream IV executive jet might be bound for the largest divorce settlement in history.
The parting of the ways of David Saperstein, a Texas business magnate and Republican Party donor who reportedly fell for the family's much younger nanny, and his wife of 23 years, Suzanne Saperstein, is titillating America's socialite set - if only because of the stunning sums of money at stake.
The couple are renowned for their extravagance, especially after building what is often described as "the most over-the-top house in Los Angeles" - a near replica of Versailles Palace - close to Beverly Hills.
Called Fleur de Lys, it boasts no fewer than 15 000 square metres and banqueting space for several hundred guests. Never mind a claim once made by Saperstein: "We are just simple country folk trying to keep bread on the table."
Big spending seems to have been a special hobby of 45-year-old Suzanne Saperstein. Vanity Fair says in its May issue that when it last profiled the family in 2002 she was "probably the world's No 1 consumer of haute couture and 18th century furniture".
The couple have three children.
It was during a journey to Texas from Fleur de Lys on the private jet last July that David dropped a bomb on his wife. At a stop-over in Houston, where he was getting off - she was to fly on to Europe - he handed her divorce papers. She subsequently made her own divorce filing in California, where the courts are alimony-friendly.
Lawyers for both parties were tight-lipped last week, but an assistant at the firm representing Suzanne Saperstein confirmed that the divorce remained unresolved. Cases are pending in Texas and California.
If Suzanne wins half of her husband's assets, her prize is likely to surpass the previous record for a divorce set in 1982 when Adnan Kashoggi, the Saudi Arabian arms dealer, paid his former wife Soraya about R6 billion.
David Saperstein's fortune grew from a single brainwave that came to him in 1977 as he was stuck in traffic during a snowstorm. A second-hand car dealer at the time, he founded a company that provided helicopter traffic reports to Houston radio stations in exchange for them advertising his dealerships for free.
The company, Metro Networks, soon began charging for the service and expanded into news and sports. Saperstein sold it to Westwood One, a nationwide provider of radio content, in 1999 for $1,25 billion (about R7,5 billion) in stock. Today he runs a high-flying investment firm called Five S Capital.
Saperstein left his wife for the family's 32-year-old Swedish nanny, Vanity Fair reported. Separately, the New York Post quoted an unidentified friend as saying the nanny, Hillevi Svensson, resembled a younger version of Suzanne.
The couple might now regret regaling Vanity Fair four years ago with details of how they met - also on board an aeroplane, although of the commercial variety, en route from Europe to the United States.
They ended up sitting next to one another and flirting until the moment David remarked on his distaste for European women because of their hairy legs, whereupon Suzanne swung a leg over his lap and invited him to run his hands up them.
It seems that Suzanne, who has quit the faux French palace for the couple's 200 hectare ranch and 6 000-square-metre house in Simi Valley, north of Los Angeles, is keen to keep publicity around the divorce to a minimum.
Late last year she sued a newspaper in her native Sweden, Expressen, alleging that it had lied about interviewing her for an article it published. - Foreign Service
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