Has Superwoman met her nemesis? Nicola Horlick is facing a £55m battle with a playboy intent on destroying her.

By Geoffrey Wansell

The battle is shaping up to be the bloodiest in the City for years.

A Godzilla versus Queen Kong fight-to-the-death over the loss of no less than £55 million - plus the small matter of an additional £7million in compensation - featuring two of the Square Mile's most colourful and controversial characters.

In one corner stands multi-millionaire Vincent Tchenguiz, 53-year-old Iranian playboy, gambler and bad boy investor, owner of no fewer than five Rolls-Royces.

Fighting to survive: Nicola Horlick faces the axe from her City firm

In the other is the City's 'Superwoman', 48-year-old Nottinghamshire-born Nicola Horlick, who famously once claimed that she really could have it all: earn millions, bring up six children, and never miss any of her children's school prize days.

At stake, in addition to the massive sums of money, is Horlick's reputation as a major City figure.

For were she to lose this financial dogfight over Bramdean Alternatives, a company that she helped to create and into which Tchenguiz invested, she would see her career left in ruins.

'Vincent intends to crush Horlick,' one adviser to the contest confided to the Mail this week, 'and everyone in the City is rooting for him.'

Horlick's solicitors, meanwhile, have responded with equal determination.

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Nicola Horlick, of course, earned the title of Superwoman for her self-confessed ability to juggle serenely the demands of being a hands-on mother to her six children, while performing the role of a perfect wife and maintaining a high-powered City job which earned her vast sums of money and immense respect in her macho work environment.

Everything Horlick touched turned to gold. She managed billions of pounds of other people's funds in the City, she fronted advertisements for investment firms, and was considered one of the most influential businesswomen in Britain.

Bathing in the media limelight, the glamorous multimillionaire investment banker wrote Can You Have It All? - a manual of domestic organisation for women. The implication was: 'Yes - and I'm the living example.'

But it was not to be. As she knew in her heart, the dream of Superwoman was too good to last

Horlick's is a story of vast riches and success. But it is laced with tragedy and, ultimately, hubris. And the battle with Tchenguiz is but the latest round in her fight for survival.

The bleak irony is that Tchenguiz and Horlick were - until the last few months - reasonably close friends.

Determined: Vincent Tchenguiz (left) insists that Nicola should be sacked as manager of Bramdean Alternatives after losing the fund millions by investing with fraudster Bernie Madoff

Close enough, at least, for him to invite her to become a tenant in the sleek office building at 35 Park Lane in London, just along the road from the Hilton Hotel, which he works in and owns.

Today, they do not even speak to each other if they meet in the lift, and any conversation is conducted through their lawyers.

As Tchenguiz put it bitterly this week: 'Every time Nicola Horlick faces a problem, she produces a legal letter.'

For her part, Horlick accuses him of 'dirty tricks', and hints that he's only pursuing her because he needs back the money that he invested in her company.

She claims that the Icelandic bank Kaupthing - which lent him the money to buy his stake in Bramdean Alternatives in the first place - will demand its cash when the loan comes due shortly.

Tchenguiz fiercely denies this. But it is not just Horlick's reputation at stake.

There is also the £7million in compensation that it would cost to end her highly lucrative five-year contract - worth £2.7million a year - to manage Bramdean Alternative's funds.

During the first two years of her stewardship, their value has slumped from £130million to £75million.

Tchenguiz, who claims to be worth several hundred million pounds - £200 million of it in cash - insists that Horlick should be sacked from her job for losing him at least £19million.

Indeed, the bespectacled, curly-haired Tchenguiz is so determined to see the end of Horlick that he is now intent on taking over Bramdean Alternatives - in which he has a 28.7 per cent stake - to make sure that the City's one-time golden girl is thrown out.

Superwoman: Nicola with four of her five children: Serena (top) and Rupert, Antonia and Georgina who died in 1998

The moon-faced Horlick - once dubbed Chloe Ovaltine for her porcelain-pale skin and doe eyes - claims that he'll never be able to do it because he doesn't have the backing of the shareholders. Tchenguiz counters by saying that he has the support of more than 50 per cent of them.

Caught in the middle, between these two mighty egos, are the directors of Bramdean Alternatives and their chairman Brian Larcombe, former chief executive of the investment company 3i.

But to understand the significance of their Titanic City power struggle, we need to take a step back in time and take a closer look at the two protagonists.

At first, Nicola led a gloriously gilded life. Cheltenham Ladies' College was followed by Balliol College Oxford and her sensationally high-flying career in the City.

At 23, she married Admiral's son Tim Horlick, whom she'd known at Balliol, and their first child, Georgiana, came along two years later.

Tragically, Georgie was diagnosed with leukaemia aged two, and it was Nicola's valiant and ultimately heartbreaking attempt to keep her alive that underpinned Nicola's life.

That battle lasted ten years. In November 1998, Georgie died, aged 12.

Five years later, after Nicola had battled on in desperate sadness, everything caught up with her.

She unexpectedly left her high-profile job of asset management with French bank Societe Generale to take a job in Australia - and had just taken the children out of school for the move Down Under when she discovered that Tim, her husband of 21 years and father of her six children, had been cheating on her with a young receptionist.

At her lavish farewell party in London's Natural History Museum, she hid behind a pillar and burst into tears. The move was cancelled and the marriage broke down. Everything had imploded.

'Tim and I were so united in trying to help Georgie when she got ill, but in grief we were very divided. We couldn't recover,' she said later.

Even so, she refused to be defeated. Supremely confident in her abilities - one rival once described her as an 'impetuous self-publicist with an ego the size of The Ritz' - she set up a new company in 2005, naming it Bramdean after the small village in Hampshire where she had a lavish weekend home.

Expensive offices were taken in Knightsbridge, not far from her central London home. Reportedly, £16,000 was spent on carpeting the reception area alone, and Horlick waited for the money to roll in for her to manage.

In September 2006, life seemed complete again, when she married Martin Baker, an author and City journalist whom she'd met when he interviewed her for an article.

Rather to her chagrin, however, the large pension funds and major investors that she'd expected to beat a path to her door did not turn up in the numbers she was expecting, and the outlook steadily became bleaker for Horlick.

The City nicknamed her new company 'Bandwagon', and insiders started to predict her demise.

The City knew only too well that she'd left the French bank after a series of ferocious rows with financier Sir Mark Weinberg, and doubts over her ability had surfaced. James Calder of the respected research group Bestinvest commented: 'She gets a lot of publicity, but her track record is not that great'.

Casting around for a way of keeping herself in the lavish manner to which she'd become accustomed - and having just gone through a painful and expensive divorce from her first husband - Horlick suggested to her then friend Tchenguiz that he might like to invest in a new company.

Bramdean Alternatives would indulge in edgier investments, including hedge funds and private equity schemes, rather than the more conventional ones she'd used in the past.

And that brings us to the other protagonist in this brutal battle of wills.

The flamboyant Tchenguiz, a bachelor who sits in front of 12 trading screens in his office, and likes nothing more than to trade anything from currencies to stock futures every day - including when he's on holiday - decided to take a punt on the woman who'd regularly asked him for advice.

So, in July 2007, he handed Horlick £38 million for almost 30 per cent of Bramdean, on the understanding that she would not become a director but rather manage its funds under a five-year contract.

Other investors included both Hampshire County Council and Merseyside Council's pension funds.

Tchenguiz insists that he only intended to invest in the new company 'for two months', because he was told the insurance company Axa 'would soon buy everything'.

That didn't happen. 'Three months came and went - and there were no buyers,' he says bitterly.

Tchenguiz sat on his stake and watched in horror as the company's value, and its share price, dropped steadily, and Horlick failed to arrest the decline.

In under 21 months, the company's shares more than halved from 100 pence in value to just 44 p.

Then, in December last year, came the final straw for Tchenguiz, when Bramdean announced that £21million of assets had been placed with the American financier Bernard Madoff, who had just been arrested for a gigantic £30 billion financial fraud.

At one point, Horlick described Madoff as someone who was 'very, very good at calling the U.S. Equity market'.

As the world now knows, Madoff pleaded guilty to the fraud charges and is now in prison for life for the offences, while the American authorities try to recover the missing billions. Many believe that most of the money has disappeared for good.

The Madoff revelation was the final straw for Tchenguiz, who'd already become convinced that Horlick was doing a very poor job looking after his money.

Furious, he decided there was no alternative but to throw out the existing Bramdean Alternatives board, install his own directors, eject Horlick and look at breaking up the company to get at least some of his money back. If he didn't, he was convinced Bramdean could be entirely bust within two years.

Horlick countered by insisting that there was a potential buyer for the company - though who that might be she has still to reveal - while Tchenguiz rounded up what he describes as the support of 'more than 50 per cent of the shareholders' for his new board of directors.

This is not just a pitched battle between two giant egos, however. It is also about money - Horlick's money. The former 'Superwoman of the City' is not as well off as once she was.

The fine house in central London has gone to her former husband as part of their divorce settlement. The Hampshire mansion, too, has been sold.

The truth is that while Tchenguiz enjoys a lavish lifestyle in his grand house in Mayfair, Horlick is sharing a small flat in South London with her second husband, whose first novel, Meltdown, was published two years ago.

Even her plans for a return to her more extravagant lifestyle appear to be on hold. Building work on a grander house nearby has been going on for almost three years - but that, it seems, has come to a standstill.

Meanwhile, building work on another house Horlick purchased in southern France in 2006 - partly, say friends, as a wedding present for her husband - has also come to a halt.

In spite of the ever rising tide of criticism, however, Horlick sails on, brushing aside suggestions that her position may be perilous every bit as grandly as she did in her first days in the Square Mile, when she earned the nickname of 'Brenda' - a reference to Private Eye's name for The Queen.

'She's never shown a single grain of humility,' says one former colleague.

Not that Vincent Tchenguiz is without his critics. A Jewish-Iraqi brought up with his younger brother Robert and sister Lisa in Iran before the family fled to England after the fall of the Shah in 1979, he started as a financial trader with Prudential Bache before going into the property business with his brother Robert.

They got a 'bad boy' reputation for borrowing money whenever they wanted to buy anything, and building larger and larger amounts of debt. Bad or not, their Roche property empire, initially supported by their father's money, went from strength to strength.

A playboy lifestyle followed. Tchenguiz has never married, for example, insisting that he might consider ' slowing down yes, settling down never'.

In addition to his Mayfair home, he has houses in South Africa and the Cote d'Azur in France - where he keeps his 130ft £10million motor yacht, as well as two £1million launches.

Then there are the 15 cars, including five Rolls-Royces, two Bentleys, an Aston Martin, a purple Lamborghini and six four-wheel drives, not to mention a penchant for gambling.

Tchenguiz is reported to have won £1million when he backed Greece to win the 2004 Euro football competition.

Like Horlick, he makes no secret that he is motivated by money - and he likes to gamble.

'It is a game and it is a business,' he likes to say. 'But it's a game we want to win. The business is just a medium of doing it.'

With that attitude, it's only too clear that Tchenguiz is intent on destroying Nicola Horlick and her reputation as a 'Superwoman' in the City of London. Whatever the outcome, the 'game' will not be a pretty sight.