Victoria Beckham Attended by Son Cruz and Girlfriend Amid Family Feud with Brooklyn
Victoria Beckham’s son Cruz showed he is still supporting his mother amid the family’s bitter feud with eldest child Brooklyn, as…
There is, it’s said, a mouth-watering amount at stake — at least £330 million, possibly as much as £1 billion. Add in two ‘SAS veterans’ and a walk-on part for Mandy Rice-Davies — the spirited showgirl at the heart of the Profumo Affair — and it begins to sound like a film script.
Perhaps, in time, that is what it will be. But, for now, the rise of Quantum Group — a firm based in Belgravia specialising in cybersecurity — is generating ferocious exchanges of fire about the military status of one of its co-founders.
Photographs of both men — currently seeking to sell a ten per cent stake of the company, valuing Quantum at £330million, with the possibility that it will be worth £1billion next year — embellish its website.
One shows its chief executive, the remarkable Floyd Woodrow, 61, who, after initial service in the Parachute Regiment, joined the SAS, was awarded the DCM and MBE for service in Iraq and Afghanistan respectively, and eventually retired, as a major, after heading the SAS’s counter-terrorist wing.
Peter Malmstrom, 57, the firm’s head of mergers and acquisitions at the Quantum Group
Mr Malmstrom was the once son-in-law of Mandy Rice-Davies, the showgirl at the heart of the Profumo affair
The other snap is of a better-nourished, bearded figure: Peter Malmstrom, 57, the firm’s head of mergers and acquisitions, and once Mandy Rice-Davies’s son-in-law. He is wearing a smart suit — and the tie of the Special Forces Club.
It’s that second detail which has surprised Special Forces veterans, who are also surprised by a report in a Sunday newspaper that Malmstrom ‘spent three years with the SAS’.
‘He attempted to join the Territorial SAS [21 SAS] but failed the initial run around the track at the Duke of York’s barracks in Chelsea,’ one decorated SAS veteran tells me.
This allegation is supported by a fellow veteran. ‘I was the DS — directing staff,’ this witness tells me. ‘It’s the first part of selection. He didn’t pass it. He claimed to have served in the early 1990s. How come — after that period of time — he had to go again at the pre-pre-selection? If you’re in it, and you’re serving, you wouldn’t have to do it.’
While Malmstrom declines to comment on his service record, Woodrow has leapt to his defence. He says Malmstrom failed the initial run because he was ‘unprepared for the course’ but that he subsequently ‘completed the run and was admitted into selection’.
Appearing in a podcast alongside Woodrow, Malmstrom said that, before doing ‘three years with 21 Special Air Service’, he first completed ‘two years with the Parachute Regiment’.
Now his time with the Paras is also being subjected to scrutiny. ‘He didn’t pass P Company,’ explains a retired Para, referring to the selection process for the regiment.
Another SAS veteran who, like Woodrow, began his service in the Paras, offers a crisp appraisal of the Quantum men. ‘Floyd is a mate,’ he tells me. Malmstrom, in his view, he alleges, is ‘a Walter Mitty, a bloater’.
But Woodrow stands by him. Malmstrom’s claims about being with the Parachute Regiment for two years and 21 SAS for three years are true, he assures me. ‘Peter is a man of great integrity,’ he says. ‘He was on the nominal roll with 21 SAS and was on loan with 10 Para.’
However, this mystifies a former officer with 21 SAS. ‘His name appears nowhere,’ this veteran tells me, after checking some of the nominal rolls for ‘A’ Squadron in the early 1990s — the period when Malmstrom, in his application to join the Special Forces Club, stated he served in that squadron. The retired officer admits the records are not complete, but adds: ‘I’ve never heard of this guy.’
Mandy Rice-Davies’s only daughter Dana, pictured with Easyjet founder Sir Stelios Haji-Ioannou
Woodrow, who proposed Malmstrom for the Special Forces Club, responds: ‘I have seen Peter’s Army paybook clearly stating 21 SAS and he has an Army number. These are the facts,’ adding that any suggestions to the contrary are untrue.
Malmstrom has weathered storms before. In 1996, he founded Exchange Direct, which became one of Britain’s leading currency-exchange specialists. Five years later, it went into liquidation after a £15 million hole was found in its accounts.
There was no question of wrongdoing by Malmstrom who by then was married to Dana Shaul, Mandy Rice-Davies’s only daughter.
Undaunted by the failure of Exchange Direct in 2001, Malmstrom became a director of a modelling agency, Isis Model Management, which had Lady Isabella Hervey on its books. He also extended his interests to motorsport, competing for Deuce Racing as ‘Peter Storm’.
But he reverted to the financial world, becoming a big cheese at investment business TMP — only to stand trial in 2012, alongside the firm’s one-time owner, Tony Morris.
Morris, who faced a charge of conspiracy to defraud and another of theft, was acquitted. So was Malmstrom, who had been charged with money laundering and transferring criminal property. By then, his marriage to Dana, with whom he had one son, had ended.
Who will have the last word about Dana’s ex-husband, perhaps in the spirit of Mandy Rice-Davies, who died in 2014 aged 70? During the
climax of the Profumo Affair, she was told Lord Astor denied having an affair with her.
‘Well, he would, wouldn’t he?’ replied Mandy.
Amanda legs it from Riviera to Sandbanks
She’s known for having ‘the longest legs in Belgravia’, but that hasn’t prevented super-rich divorcee Amanda Cronin from adding to her height by standing on her tiptoes for this holiday snap.
The 5ft 10in former model shared this photograph from the Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc on the French Riviera. And now she’s planning a ‘homecoming’ to the South Coast of England.
Beauty entrepreneur Amanda, 55, whose parents are from Dorset, is to host a party in Sandbanks next week to celebrate the launch of her eponymous skincare range.
‘That area is very special to me,’ Amanda says. ‘I know that my products will do really well down there.’
A year after her death at 79, Fiona, Lady Montagu, widow of the colourful third Lord Montagu of Beaulieu, has delivered a final surprise in her £5.4 million will.
In a codicil signed days before she died, she bequeathed £40,000 to a mysterious Mohammed Ibrahim Abdoul Akime, of London, the city it was said Fiona visited to ‘get away from it all’.
RAIN is forecast at Balmoral next week, but Sarah, Duchess of York, will no doubt do her best to lighten up the atmosphere when she arrives with her ex-husband, Prince Andrew, at King Charles’s Highlands retreat.
It will be the first Scottish holiday that Fergie and the Duke of York have taken with the King and Queen Camilla since moves began to evict them from Royal Lodge, their home at Windsor for the past two decades.
‘The Duke sees no reason why they should leave Royal Lodge,’ a friend tells me. ‘It was always meant as their ‘forever home’. That hasn’t changed.’
Very modern manners
HOW do you know if that person with the vaguely familiar face is really famous? By checking their body art, of course.
Ben Jordan says pop singer Dua Lipa has just visited his cafe on Marazion Beach, in Cornwall: ‘My daughter said it looked like Dua Lipa. Then she recognised her tattoos after a Google search.’
Lederer reveals naked truth
Helen Lederer startled guests at The Oldie magazine’s literary luncheon this week by declaring she was a naturist.
The (fully clothed) comedienne, 69, explained that her ‘conversion’ happened after a summer holiday went wrong and she ended up sweltering in a ‘budget’ Greek villa in the middle of nowhere.
Comedienne elen Lederer reveals she is a naturist after being converted when a summer holiday went wrong and she ended up in ‘budget’ Greek villa in the middle of nowhere
‘Now I don’t want to put clothes on again,’ the Absolutely Fabulous star told guests at the National Liberal Club, off Whitehall.
‘It was so hot we just thought, ‘Get rid of the cossies’, and went naturist.’ Lederer, who was promoting her memoirs, Not That I’m Bitter, adds: ‘I used to think nudism was a bit ‘Carry On’, but now I seriously understand the concept — it’s the air blowing on your bare skin and the feeling of freedom.’
Emily’s in Paris… but Kate’s in style
The Princess of Wales has been seen in public only a handful of times this year, but her style influence has clearly not diminished.
In the first episode of the new series of hit drama Emily In Paris, one of the characters, Mindy Chen, tries on an outfit seemingly inspired by the mint Balmain blazer Catherine wore to Wimbledon last year — and like her shows it off next to a handsome man in a cream suit, in Kate’s case Roger Federer.
When Mindy shows her friend the pink blazer dress, Emily responds: ‘It’s a little more Kate Middleton than you normally go.’
The Princess of Wales’s fashion influence is still strong, as Emily in Paris character Mindy Chen tried on an outfit seemingly inspired Kate’s at Wimbledon 2023
Could life get any better for Guy Ritchie, who’s announced his Netflix series The Gentlemen is to return for a second season?
I ask because Ritchie, 55, who trousered a £13 million dividend for his directorial efforts last year, is even lining things up for the afterlife. He’s got the green light for a private burial plot at Ashcombe, his 1,134-acre estate on the Wiltshire-Dorset border.
He has, though, been told to shift it 20ft to the west, as the site originally earmarked was above an ‘Iron Age and Romano-British settlement’. He’ll make no bones about it, I trust.
The smart set’s talking about… Why Jodie’s jumping for joy
Trebles all round for model-turned-publican Jodie Kidd! She recently revived her modelling career when she was chosen to become the new face of Burberry, but now she’s jumping with joy for a different reason.
Jodie, 45, has been named the new director of Hickstead, the renowned showjumping course in West Sussex.
She follows in the footsteps of her grandmother Janet and father Johnny. Her godfather was Douglas Bunn, who founded the showground in 1960. ‘I have so many great memories of Hickstead when growing up, such as watching Buddy Bunn win the Hickstead Derby in 2004, one of my godfather’s proudest moments,’ she says, referring to his horse. ‘There wasn’t a dry eye in the place that day.’
Jodie will still be keeping her day job as the landlady of the Half Moon pub in Kirdford, also in West Sussex.
