Just what happened to the INXS singer Michael Hutchence’s reputed millions – and whether his daughter, Tiger Lily, stands to inherit his supposed fortune – has been one of the enduring mysteries of the rock world.
Now, with the release of the Paradise Papers, documents have emerged shedding fresh light on who owns the rights to Hutchence’s body of work, which includes several unpublished songs.
They show that Hutchence’s business manager, Colin Diamond, lawfully sought to set up a company called Helipad Plain in 2015 in the tax haven of Mauritius to further exploit “sound recordings, images, films, and related material embodying the performance of Michael Hutchence” for the 20th anniversary of the singer’s death this month.
The documents make no mention of Heavenly Hiraani Tiger Lily, Hutchence’s daughter from his relationship with the TV presenter Paula Yates.
Instead, in one email exchange with the law firm Appleby, Diamond’s lawyer says Diamond is the beneficial owner of Hutchence’s material and entitled to deal with it.
The litigation that has surrounded Hutchence’s estate, including two cases in Australia, caused Appleby to rate their new client as “high” risk.
“Risk profile of High is being attributed to the company,” an Appleby staff member wrote in the file in 2015. “Reason being that although rationale has been received behind Colin Diamond being the BO [beneficial owner] of Michael Hutchence’s estate, there is still risk about the properties being misused given previous court cases involving Chardonnay [Diamond’s company].”
When Hutchence was found dead in a Sydney hotel room in an apparent suicide in 1997 it sparked a bitter war over his estate.
His mother, Patricia Glassop, father Kel, and sister Tina battled for eight years through the Australian courts with Diamond over what they believed was an estate worth between $10m and $20m. In the end they were told by the executor the singer had died owning virtually nothing.
As the 2005 court case revealed, Hutchence’s assets were held in labryinth of offshore trusts set up in tax havens by Diamond and other advisers. Hutchence was not a beneficiary and deliberately so, according to the advisers. They claimed Hutchence had not wanted his relatives and girlfriends to get their hands on his fortune.
This was at odds with the wishes the rock star expressed in his will, which left half of his estate to Tiger Lily, with the rest split equally between Yates, his mother, father, brother and sister.
There were also two bequests of $250,000 to Amnesty International and Greenpeace. These were never received.
Yates died four years after Hutchence of an accidental heroin overdose. Tiger Lily, then four, was adopted by Bob Geldof, Yates’s former partner.
In a second court case, in 2010, Chardonnay Investments sued the five remaining members of INXS, laying claim to a one-sixth share of the airplay rights and revenues from the exploitation of Hutchence’s image. Diamond claimed Hutchence had transferred all rights to Chardonnay, a company controlled by him, four years before his death.
Lawyers for the band said there had been a settlement with Diamond. Rights to the INXS recordings are held by Atlantic Records and Universal Records. Hutchence’s songwriting/publishing rights for the INXS songs are owned in perpetuity by Warner Chappell Music after a buyout deal with Diamond.
But Chardonnay still lays claim to some song rights and other material, as the Paradise Papers appear to show.
“In the settlement with the estate of Michael Hutchence it was agreed that all intellectual property rights belonged to Chardonnay Investments Ltd which is controlled by Colin Diamond and by virtue of him being the ultimate beneficial owner, he controls the assets of Chardonnay,” Diamond’s lawyer, Michael Lim, wrote in one email to Appleby.
He went on to explain that this arrangement had been put in place because Hutchence had “various family issues” and had left Diamond to deal with Chardonnay’s assets. There was no mention of Tiger Lily or any trust.
When Tiger Lily turned 21 in July this year, the Sun newspaper reported she would “inherit millions” from the royalties from Hutchence’s music.
The Paradise Papers have cast doubt on this. There have been reports over the years that Geldof reached a settlement with Diamond over Tiger Lily’s share of the estate but no confirmation. Geldof was not available for comment.
Appleby was also nervous about some of the indirect investors in Helipad Plain, because their shares were held in nominee companies in various tax havens.
They used a global business intelligence database to run a check on Diamond and his business partner, Ron Creevey, an Australian tech entrepreneur who is being sued for alleged securities fraud in the US, as well as the investors who were backing Creevey’s company, Moment Media. Creevey told Fairfax Media that the allegations were “#fakenews”, a “smear campaign” and “defamatory”.
One of the investors funding the venture was the Sydney nightclub king John Ibrahim. Other investors include some of the City of London’s banking bluebloods: Peregrine Crosthwaite, the former head of investment banking at Investec’s London office; the Hereford cherry farmer and philanthropist Clive Richards; David McAlpine, a director at the engineering firm Sir Robert McAlpine Ltd; and the Conservative party supporter Sir David Ord, the managing director of the Bristol Port Company. The Australian businessman Bob Mansfield was a former shareholder.
Some material held by Chardonnay Investments saw the light of day in a two-part documentary, Michael Hutchence: The Last Rockstar, which aired last month on the Seven Network.
It featured a rare interview with Diamond. But the remaining members of INXS and their manager, Chris Murphy, were highly critical of the programme, labelling it “unauthorised”. The band was not approached to take part and instead old interviews were spliced into the documentary.
Its executive producer, Mark Llewellyn of Seven, said he had dealt with Diamond and that Creevey had provided introductions.
“Colin Diamond, who was the co-executor of Michael’s estate and a close friend of Michael’s, provided his interview and access to the unique archive in his possession for no money,” Llewellyn said. No fee was paid to either man, he added.
The payoff for Diamond will perhaps come when the 15 previously unreleased songs see the light of day.
Creevey has said he and Moment Media are no longer involved in the Helipad Plain venture. He was unavailable for comment. Diamond was also unavailable.
The material in the Paradise Papers comes from two offshore service providers and the company registries of 19 tax havens, and was obtained by the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung and shared by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists with partners including the Guardian.
