Exiled Brunei prince sues Britons in property scam

NEW YORK, Dec 2 (Reuters) The exiled prince of Brunei, accused of squandering the wealth of his tiny Southeast Asian homeland, sued two Britons in a US court, saying they bilked him out of millions of dollars through property scams.

Prince Jefri, who counts the Palace Hotel in New York among his personal assets and once used Brunei's money to buy gold-plated toilet brushes, claims Faith Zaman and her husband, Thomas William Derbyshire, conned him by ''posing as English lawyers.'' The younger brother of Brunei's ruling monarch hired the pair as attorneys in 2004, paying them 1 million dollars a year, and Zaman then assumed several high-level positions in companies in charge of Jefri's vast real estate holdings, according to the lawsuit filed in US District Court in Manhattan.

In 2005, Zaman and Derbyshire sold Jefri's 28-acre estate on Long Island -- then valued at million -- to another defendant in the suit, Westfields Invest Limited LLC, for 11.8 million dollars, but the money was never transferred to the prince, the prince alleges.

Zaman and Derbyshire also are accused of diverting 5 million dollars of the prince's money from a real estate sale to buy a Manhattan Beach, California, property for 2.2 million dollars.

Zaman, 30, became managing director of the Palace Hotel in February, and Jefri accuses her of setting up a fake London company from which the hotel bought 4 million dollars worth of plasma-screen television sets. The suit says she sent the money to her bank account in Monaco.

The pair also fraudulently charged ''hundreds of thousands, and possibly millions of dollars'' in personal expenses to the prince's accounts and paid a family member ''an exorbitant salary for a virtual no-show'' job, the suit charges.

Derbyshire and Zaman were not immediately available for comment yesterday.

Oil-producing Brunei has demanded that Jefri return billions of dollars he is accused of squandering while head of the nation's state investment agency, before he was fired in 1998. He is reported to maintain homes in London, New York and Paris.

Brunei, one of the world's few remaining absolute monarchies, is a country of fewer than 400,000 people that sits on the northern edge of the island of Borneo.

REUTERS SB RAI1100