The City fund genius, his nightclub boss lover and a £4m battle with his brother

HE was a City genius who sparred with Boris Johnson in debates when they were students together at Oxford.

Now the late Danny Truell’s multimillion-pound fortune is at the centre of a bitter court battle between his lover and his brother.

Magdalena Zalinska, 44, a nightclub boss, is being sued by Edi Truell over claims she obtained £4million from Danny by ‘undue influence’ before he died of a neurological condition aged 55 in 2019.

Miss Zalinska, who was left more than £1million in Danny’s will, denies the allegations, insisting they had a ‘romantic and loving relationship’ for 14 years.

Edi, a City financier, 59, claims that although she had a sexual relationship with his brother, she was his paid carer from 2012 and did not live with him.

The case has not yet gone to a full High Court trial, but a judge this month rejected a bid by Edi and the other executor of Danny’s will, solicitor John Rayner Hatchard, to have Miss Zalinska jailed for contempt of court.

They accused her of breaching a freezing order designed to preserve her bank balance until the case is decided. It limited her to £500 a week to pay for her upkeep, and reasonable legal expenses. But she made withdrawals and purchases totalling about £76,000 in the four weeks after the order was made last July.

Lifelong Labour Party member Danny Truell was a contemporary at Balliol College of future prime minister Mr Johnson and frequently faced him in debates.

He went on to become a hugely successful fund manager. After running Goldman Sachs’ asset management arm, he moved

‘An apparently frugal lifestyle’

to Britain’s biggest charity the Wellcome Trust as its chief investment officer in 2005. In 12 years, he grew assets under management from £12.3billion to £20.9billion. He also allowed it to double the amount it donated a year, to more than £1billion.

He and Naomi, his wife of 16 years, divorced in 2011. In 2012 he was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis which later became a form of motor neurone disease.

Mr Justice Michael Green said Danny had considerable personal wealth but lived ‘an apparently frugal lifestyle’, did not drive, have expensive hobbies or go on many holidays, and lived in ‘a modest and poorly furnished basement and ground floor maisonette’ near Clapham Junction, London. During his illness he was ‘dependent on alcohol’, the judge added.

In his will, he described Miss Zalinska, a Polish national and divorced mother of two who has also struggled with alcohol, as his ‘partner and dependent’.

The court battle is over a series of transfers to her before Danny died. These included £1.34million paid between 2013 and 2018 to a company through which she operated her London nightclub, Southwark Rooms.

Another £915,000 went to her directly in electronic transfers, £1.366million on spending and withdrawals using his debit card, while he also transferred to her his interest in the flat she had previously rented from him in Clapham.

The judge said Miss Zalinska was ‘rightly in my view offended by any suggestion that she was not in a deep and loving relationship with the deceased, or that she had taken advantage of him’.

Rejecting the bid to have Miss Zalinska jailed for contempt for exceeding spending limits given to her under the freezing order, the judge said she needed ‘rehabilitation, not punishment’.

After Mr Truell’s death, her drink problem had worsened and she lived a chaotic, party lifestyle in a flat in Croydon. Giving evidence, she said she had become surrounded by people who saw her as a ‘soft touch’. She gave her debit card to some of them and did not know what a lot of her money had been spent on, she said. The judge said she had admitted some of the allegations of overspending, some of it done ‘recklessly’ and for her benefit, but it was not a deliberate attempt to dissipate her assets before a trial of the £4million claim against her can take place.