The Sunday Times February 13, 2022 2GN 5
NEWS
She has receipts for a number of the
items she is alleged to have stolen, includ-
ing the sheets and Nespresso machine. “I
didn’t confess to stealing them because I
have the receipts. I have produced
receipts for the majority of the items,”
she said. “I returned the items as a
gesture of goodwill and I didn’t want
them in my house as a reminder of this
terrible situation.”
Smith has also accused her of
embezzling significant funds, while she
says that the money was from a joint bank
account.
In a statement through his lawyer,
Smith said his former partner had
“grossly misrepresented the situation”.
“She surely can see a justification for
her arrest since she stole truckloads of
my belongings, to which she confessed,”
he said. “Without Ms de Freitas’s actions
there could be no arrest. If this is now
causing her difficulties with regards to
travel, perhaps she should consider her
own actions as the source of the problem,
not mine, but I doubt she will.”
The former couple’s lawyers havebeen sending correspondence back and
forth for a year, beginning with a bitter
custody battle relating to de Freitas’s
child from another relationship, a minor.
Smith argues that he has treated the
child as “my own” since birth and had no
alternative but to initiate proceedings
after his ex “cut my access to the child
without any warning or explanation”.
De Freitas, who has a degree in law,
has instructed one of the top lawyers on
the island. The theft case is expected to
drag on for several months. The row over
the disputed items began last April,
weeks after de Freitas’s sister Celia, 53,
died in London. Police arrived at the
home she shares with her new partner
asking about the household objects she
had allegedly stolen, an experience she
describes as “hugely traumatic”.
“I was still deeply grieving and they are
telling me: ‘We are here to take you in for
questioning because you stole,’” she said.
Going to court and dealing with the
police was the most “degrading experi-
ence”, de Freitas said, adding: “I have
never stolen anything in my life. I am acompany secretary, I come from a nice
Guyanese family. I was raised a devout
Catholic.”
Her father, a former car dealership
boss, discovered he had inoperable pan-
creatic cancer last month following rapid
weight loss. De Freitas says he recently
suffered from a pulmonary embolism.
“He is dying, so he could die tonight,”
de Freitas said. “I told him I was coming
and I am very worried about breaking my
promise. He said to me he would wait. We
have a deal.”
If the court does not rule she can leave,
it will be a “massive blow”, de Freitas
says. “I don’t know how I would cope...
How do I tell my dad that? I said I was
coming on Monday. I mean, he is hanging
on.”
Regarded as Britain’s most famous and
influential investor, Smith moved Fund-
smith to the island in 2014 and became a
Mauritian resident in 2017. His equity
fund has grown by more than 506 per
cent since it was launched in 2010.
The country has more favourable tax
rates than Britain. However, Smith has
always said that he moved “partly
because the time zone is convenient for
dealing in Asia and I am better at manag-
ing money away from the noise of a major
financial centre”.
De Freitas, who has a new partner,
says she now wants to “be able to live a
normal life” and is “petrified” of more
legal action. “You are waiting to see if
someone is coming up your drive or
parking outside and you are thinking:
‘Am I going to be served [with legal
papers]?’” she said.
Smith said yesterday that he had “no
influence whatsoever” over the police on
the island and “no involvement in any
decision by them to stop her leaving
Mauritius”, adding that his former
partner “has repeatedly attempted trial
by media”.
It is understood that Smith was not
aware of de Freitas’s father’s health until
contacted for comment.
“My primary concern is and has
always been for the child and I simply
wish to ensure that they are well cared
for,” he said.MadeiraINDIAN
OCEAN
SOUTH
ATL ANTIC
OCEANMauritius6,150 miles
12,
Number of men in Britain
who die from prostate
cancer each yearNew test can spot which prostate tumours may be fatal
As a doctor himself, Pratik
Shah sought a range of advice
when he was diagnosed with
prostate cancer.
“I saw three consultants,”
the 60-year-old gynaecologist
from north London said.
“And I got three different
opinions. There was no
consensus. I could see that
even among professionals
there was a debate as to what
was the ideal treatment.”
It is a problem that faces
tens of thousands of men
with prostate cancer everyyear. While prostate cancer
can be lethal, the tumour is
slow-growing for many men,
and might never cause any
health problems. But
differentiating between
aggressive and harmless
tumours — particularly at an
early stage — is not easy.
Now researchers at
Cambridge have developed a
technique for mapping the
metabolism of prostate
cancer to help tell the cancers
apart. Dr Nikita Sushentsev,
one of the researchers, said
the breakthrough advanced
the search for a test that can“reliably distinguish the
‘tigers’ from ‘pussycats’ in
prostate cancer”.
Giving a patient an
injection of a special solution,
followed by an MRI scan,
gives doctors an insight into
the activity of each tumour.
In the past they could only
see its size on a scan. Now
they can see how active it is.
Results of a trial among ten
prostate patients, published
in Nature Communications
last month, demonstrates the
technique can provide a
strong signal.
The technique works byattaching carbon-13, a non-
radioactive form of carbon
that can be picked up on
scans, to pyruvate, a sugar-
like molecule. This solution is
injected into the vein and is
rapidly sucked up by the
tumour. When lactate —
which at high levels is a
marker of an aggressive
tumour — is produced, it
retains the carbon-13, which
lights up on an MRI scan.
Each of the ten men in the
trial had surgery to remove
their prostate. The anatomy
and chemistry of their
tumours and the surroundingtissue was carefully assessed
and compared to the scans.
In future, researchers hope
that scans could help patients
avoid surgery altogether. A
study in 2016 suggested up to
20,000 men a year wereundergoing unnecessary
surgery or radiotherapy for
prostate cancer.
Shah, one of the ten
patients in the study, said he
had decided to undergo
surgery, primarily because
his father, Narendra, had died
of the disease at the age of 60.
“It was not an easy decision
to take, but it was coloured by
the fact that my father had
died. If the doctors were
finding it difficult to advise
me, I certainly found it
difficult to make a decision.”
Some 52,000 men are
diagnosed with prostatecancer in the UK each year.
About 30,000 have localised
tumours which are
considered low-risk.
Common symptoms include
needing to go to the lavatory
frequently, particularly at
night, and pain while
urinating. Nearly 12,000 men
die of the disease each year.
The difficulty is how to
treat the disease. Should
doctors remove the entire
prostate, removing the threat
but creating a significant risk
of side effects such as
incontinence and impotence?
Or should they hold off onBen Spencer Science Editor treatment until the cancer
starts to grow?
Professor Tristan Barrett, a
consultant radiologist who
co-led the project, which was
funded by Cancer Research
UK and Prostate Cancer UK,
said for obviously mild or
obviously aggressive cases
the options were clear. “But
there’s a difficult grey area,”
he said. “For those patients in
the middle — where the
standard imaging and a
biopsy do not necessarily
help — this technique could
potentially give an
advantage.”It is like
a basic
right
taken
away. It
is wrong
Teresa de Freitas
says she wants to
live a “normal
life”. She and
Terry Smith,above, are
trading legal
blows in
Mauritius after
breaking updeaths involving e-scooters in
2019 and 2020, according to
the Parliamentary Advisory
Council for Transport Safety
(Pacts), a road safety charity.
Last year that rose to ten,
with a further 47 head
injuries and a total of 133
serious injuries.
Illegal riders may be
penalised with six points
on their driving licence and
are subject to the same
drink-drive laws as motorists.
The Metropolitan Police
confiscated 3,987 e-scooters
last year.
It is only legal to ride
e-scooters in public if they are
rented through carefully
regulated government trials,
which have been conducted
in almost 60 towns and cities.
At the end of October there
were 22,644 rental scooterson the roads and 31 trials will
continue until November.
Baroness Stowell, a former
chairwoman of the Charity
Commission, said she feared
they would become
“permissible on public roads”
and that this was happening
“by stealth because of inertia
in enforcing the current
laws”.
She cast doubt on the
“enthusiasm” of the police
“to do what is required of
them”.
In a statement, Scotland
Yard said: “There remains an
ongoing challenge regarding
the policing of the use of
these devices because of their
number and availability.” It
implied that they are low
priority: “The safety risk of
their use is less overall, in
terms of harm, compared toother forms of transport.” It is
focusing on repeat offenders
or where the rider is
suspected of committing
other offences.
E-scooters are also fuelling
a crime wave. Trevor Sterling,
a partner at the law firm
Moore Barlow and founder of
the Major Trauma Group,
which campaigns for
e-scooter safety, said that
criminals who once used
mopeds for getaways are now
using e-scooters capable of
up to 50mph.
The Advertising Standards
Authority said it would
investigate selling practices.
“We’re concerned to see
these e-scooters being
marketed in this way, and our
compliance team will take a
further look,” it said.
@nicholashellenThe former partner of one of Britain’s
richest financiers is trapped on Mauritius
and has been prevented from visiting her
terminally ill father.
Teresa de Freitas, 47, has split from the
fund manager Terry Smith, 68, but has
been charged with stealing items from
the home they once shared. They include
a £89.95 Nespresso machine and £222 of
White Company bedding.
As a result, she is currently banned
from leaving the island as a complicated
legal process plays out — and even needs
to seek court approval to visit her father,
who is receiving palliative care for pan-
creatic cancer more than 6,000 miles
away in Madeira.
A court hearing is scheduled for
tomorrow, where de Freitas will hear if
she is able to leave the island, but she is
furious that she is being put in this posi-
tion.
“It is like your basic right as a human
being is taken away from you. It is
depraved in a way, it is wrong,” she said.
“I am supposed to have stolen a
Nespresso machine and I can’t go and see
my dying father? How can you do this to a
woman in the 21st century?”
De Freitas, a company secretary, took
furniture and other belongings out of the
villa the pair shared last year after her
13-year relationship with Smith, who has
an estimated fortune of £300 million,
ended. Smith says she took “truckloads
of my belongings”, while de Freitas says
many of the items were owned by her and
that she has now returned them.
Dubbed Britain’s Warren Buffett,
Smith is the boss of the investment fund
Fundsmith, which holds £26 billion of
savers’ money. The son of a lorry driver
and a factory worker, Smith, originally
from east London, opened an office on
the island in the Indian Ocean in 2014 and
last year earned £29.7 million. The pair
fell in love after working together at the
stockbroker Collins Stewart in 2005.
For the past year they have been
embroiled in 22 legal disputes, both civil
and criminal. Both de Freitas and Smith
have launched legal action against each
other and the cases are still going through
the courts.
On Friday, de Freitas went to court to
ask to travel to Madeira, off the coast of
northwest Africa, to see her father, John
Simon. Recent video footage shows the
81-year-old looking gaunt and hooked up
to machines. “It is this idea that you are
trapped. You are on a tiny island in the
middle of the south Indian Ocean where
leaving illegally has long-term conse-
quences,” she said.
Mauritius police said a request for a
“variation order” had been made to the
director of public prosecutions. De Frei-
tas has a flight booked for tomorrow
night in the expectation that she will be
allowed to leave after the hearing.Trapped in an island paradise:
financier’s ex fights to fly out
A court hearing over alleged theft is stopping the ex-partner of a fund manager leaving Mauritius to visit her terminally ill father
James Coney, Emily Kent Smith and
Richard AsshetonWomen can’t write history books?
That thinking belongs to the past
Booker prize shortlist had no
women on it. The prize is
now sponsored by Baileys.
“Women’s fiction has
caught up with men’s since
that prize was launched,”
Lipscomb said. Her next book
will tackle the wives of Henry
VIII, where she will “try to
scrape off the accumulated
misogyny of centuries”.
Professor Sir Richard
Evans, regius professor
emeritus of history at
Cambridge, said “it is wrong
to say women are not taken
seriously as historians by the
public” and there were many
popular female historians,
although “military history is
largely written ... by men”.
He added: “The idea of a
women’s history prize is a
good one. The more history
prizes the better.”tops the charts with 43,
sales. There are two books by
women in the top ten.
Lipscomb plans to launch
the UK’s first non-fiction prize
for women to boost the
profile of female
historians and has
discussed this with the
writer Kate Mosse.
The prize would be
run along the lines of
the women’s prize
for fiction, which
Mosse started as
the Orange prize
after the 1991write history and we are all
aware of this disparity.”
While women have broken
through in presenting history
on television, where stars
such as Lucy Worsley,
Mary Beard and Kate
Williams appear
regularly on screen,
Lipscomb said that
female historians
still lag behind in the
publishing world.
Figures produced
this weekend by
Nielsen, the
market research
firm, back up her
claim. In the top
100 history books
of 2021, only 19
are by women.
Empireland, by the
Times columnist
Sathnam Sanghera,Many people believe that
women do not write serious
works such as history books
as well as men, according to
Suzannah Lipscomb, the
academic and author.
She said people think
women “lack authority”,
adding: “The bestseller lists
are dominated by men.”
Lipscomb, 43 is emeritus
professor at Roehampton
university and has co-
presented several TV history
documentaries with Dan
Jones. She said: “The public’s
perspectives on authority lag
behind attitudes on this in
universities. It is harder for a
woman to be seen to hold the
authority a man does. I have a
lot of female friends who
Sian Griffiths
Education Editor
Suzannah
Lipscomb
plans a non-
fiction prize for
women to raise
the profile of
female historiansMillion e-scooters on the road
(but most are ridden illegally)
E-scooters are being
marketed by shops as suitable
for commuting, or for “zip
arounds” in towns and cities,
even though it is illegal to ride
them on public roads.
Amazon, Currys, Fenwick,
Halfords and John Lewis
displayed warnings in small
print online or in their stores
that the vehicles must not be
used on public highways.
When confronted by The
Sunday Times, some changed
their website listings.
E-scooters are only permitted
on private property.
An estimated 1 million
privately owned e-scooters
are on the roads, with a rising
toll of deaths and serious
injuries. There were threeNicholas Hellen and
Louise Eccles