Wives of sex baron lose sons' title fight
The hopes of two Filipino women with rival claims that their sons were heirs to the title of Fourth Baron Moynihan of Leeds have been dashed by the High Court.
Former Conservative Party sports minister Colin Moynihan, the half-brother of the rogue peer who fled Britain to evade a string of arrest warrants, is now 'more rather than less likely' to take the title.
The divorce of the Philippines brothel-owning late third Lord Moynihan from his fourth wife Editha was ruled null and void, making his fifth marriage to Jinna Sabiaga, a hotel receptionist, bigamous and his son Daniel, five, illegitimate.
This means that Editha can now go ahead with claims in the Philippines to the peer's multimillion-dollar massage parlour sex empire.
Judge Sir Stephen Brown said the affair was caused by the 'wicked selfishness' of Lord Moynihan, who died aged 55 in 1991.
The victims, he said, were Jinna's son Daniel, five, and Editha's son Andrew, six.
Sir Stephen delivered a 55-page judgment to try to clear up the tangled web of 'lies and deceit' that surrounded Antony Patrick Andrew Cairnes Berkeley Moynihan's divorce petition.
Lord Moynihan, said the judge, was a man 'accomplished in fraud and indeed in forgery'.
'I have no doubt that Lord Moynihan's divorce petition was deliberately framed in a way which was calculated to deceive the court,' the judge said.
'He wished to obtain a divorce. He wished to do so even if his wife objected to it, as I believe she did, or would have objected if only on financial grounds.' Editha, overjoyed at the outcome of the case, told outside court how she met the penniless peer in 1980, when he was renting a house in the Philippines.
'I had to pawn my jewellery so we could get married,' she said. 'I worked hard to make all the money we made. I worked night and day.' But her son is unlikely to inherit the title because DNA tests have proved Lord Moynihan is not his father.
