Dunhill Heir’s Sparkle Dims as Gem Pal Disappears

He was the Ferrari-driving jeweller who once appeared on ITV’s This Morning, fitting a £500,000 string of sparklers around Holly Willoughby’s neck.

But after the extraordinary collapse of the exuberant Vashi Dominguez’s business empire inspired a BBC Panorama investigation last month, I can reveal that investors – who between them have lost a staggering £170 million – are not the only ones to have suffered from their links with the tycoon.

Buccaneering financier Piers Dunhill – pictured standing shoulder to shoulder with Dominguez in a New York bar just three months before his jewellery firm was hit with a winding-up order in 2023 – has also endured a reversal of fortune with regard to his own business, Dunhill Ventures.

Indeed, nine out of the 11 key members of the firm in 2023 have now quit. Four of those have expunged any mention of Dunhill Ventures from their profiles on LinkedIn, while others have left the business networking site entirely.

Dunhill, 31, declines to comment on this, or whether he will co-operate with the Serious Fraud Office if it initiates an investigation into Dominguez, who had opened a glitzy ‘concept store’ in London’s Covent Garden and talked of opening 200 more around the world ‘in the near future’.

Panorama revealed how Dominguez’s former employees told how they had been instructed to pose as customers to create the illusion that the business was thriving and reassuring investors, such as John Caudwell, the Phones 4u billionaire, that all was well. But by April 2023 the firm had gone into liquidation and Dominguez vanished soon afterwards.

Caudwell later said he’d invested £1million, while two other big names had put in £10million and £15million respectively.

As for Dunhill, I disclosed last year that he had attended roadshows with Renato Brioni – previously known as Renato Libric, who, in 2018, received a three-year jail term for wire fraud and was ordered to pay over £1.14million in compensation.

More recently, Dunhill has himself done a little tidying up of a name that still appears on his company website. It’s that of his great-grandfather – or, by some calculations, his great-great-grandfather.

Previously listed as ‘Sir Alfred Dunhill’, this forebear is now plain ‘Alfred Dunhill’ – a strangely belated correction, since the tobacco goods tycoon was never knighted.

The bare cheek! Nat and Laura’s cancer warning

As Alison in the 2011 coming-of-age classic The Inbetweeners Movie, she went skinny-dipping in Greece with her awkward admirer, Will.

Now Laura Haddock is topless on a beach again – this time in England, though – with Sky Sports presenter Natalie Pinkham.

Natalie, 48, and Laura, 40, posed together – their modesty protected by a saucy sketch – as part of a breast-cancer awareness campaign organised by the group Women In Art.

‘Someone [is] diagnosed every ten minutes in the UK alone… and yet almost half of British women still do not regularly check their boobs,’ Natalie posts on social media.

‘Guard your life, check your boobs.’

With a tongue-in-cheek nod to the weather, she adds: ‘We may rethink a photoshoot on a UK beach at the end of October next time.’

As the late Queen Elizabeth’s first cousin, it might be assumed that Princess Alexandra, 88, is used to having her picture taken. But royal snapper Hugo Burnand, 61, reveals: ‘She doesn’t like being photographed – and she doesn’t really like to see her smile. It’s just not her thing.’ Asked on his Double Exposure podcast whether she thought she wasn’t photogenic, Burnand, who shot official portraits for the King’s Coronation, says: ‘Probably. But she’s so wrong. [She is] one of the most beautiful people, and that smile is incredible.’

When Poet Laureate Simon Armitage wrote a poem to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Pink Floyd’s album Wish You Were Here, he probably didn’t expect to create an Us And Them divide between genres.

But opera director Sir David Pountney, 78, says the line ‘You killed classical music with one stroke, good riddance’ in Dear Pink Floyd, which Mr Armitage, 62, released this week, is ‘mean-spirited’. He added: ‘Armitage should change that sour line, which disfigures his superb tribute.’

He directed the Simon Pegg ‘zom-com’ Shaun Of The Dead, and, at just nine years old, coaxed a cinema manager into letting him see the

age-rated horror film Gremlins. But even Edgar Wright’s passion for spooky things has its limits. ‘When I used to live in LA… Halloween itself was a four-day weekend,’ the 51-year-old recalls. ‘If I have one bugbear about Halloween, it’s that in Los Angeles it seems to go on for three f****** months.

‘It starts at the end of August – it’s ridiculous.’

Bubbly Penny’s royal toast

She held the 8lb Sword of State up for 51 minutes at the King’s Coronation.

But Penny Mordaunt’s dedication to her role as Lord President of the Council went even further.

At the launch of Pomp & Circumstance, a book she has written with PR boss Chris Lewis, Dame Penny, 52, tells me how she looked after those involved in the event at Westminster Abbey in May 2023, revealing: ‘I knew there’d be people who had nothing else to do. I brought into

Parliament an enormous amount of champagne at my expense, and said, “Anyone who doesn’t have somewhere to be, come back and we’ll toast the King”. Directly after the ceremony we raised a toast.’

Making murder dead chic

Actresses Sienna Miller and Jazzy de Lisser made sure Halloween was anything but spooky – unless you count being dead chic as ghoulish.

Sienna, 43, and Jazzy, 34, marked the first anniversary of the fashion brand DeBute in The Penthouse at The London Edition hotel near Oxford Street by taking part in a themed murder-mystery soiree with a haute twist.

On the night, London’s beau monde answered the call, slipping into tongue-in-cheek personas inspired by some of fashion’s most fabulous archetypes.

Jazzy and her half-sister Lady Lola Bute co-founded DeBute last year to ‘tell the story of sisterhood’.

• Edited by Harry Dougherty