Nicholas van Hoogstraten

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For the Broadway television producer and author, see Nicholas van Hoogstraten.

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Nicholas Van Hoogstraten (born February 25, 1945) is a wealthy British businessman and property owner, with a criminal history.

He was born Nicholas Marcel Hoogstraten in Shoreham-by-Sea, the son of a shipping agent. He was educated at a local Jesuit school. He left school in 1962 and joined the Royal Navy for a year. He started his property business in Bermuda using a stamp collection as initial finance.

He subsequently returned to Great Britain later in the 1960s with purchases in London and Brighton. By 1968 he was reportedly Britain's youngest millionaire with a portfolio of over 300 properties, but the same year started serving four year sentence in prison, as a consequence of a grenade attack on a clergyman's (and debtor's) home. By 1980 he owned over 2,000 properties. As the housing market boomed in the early 1990s, and prompted by a spat with the Inland Revenue, he sold the majority of his housing, investing in other fields outside Britain, including mining interests in Nigeria and later Zimbabwe.

He is building a mansion, Hamilton Palace, near Uckfield in East Sussex. Construction of the neo-classical building began in 1985 and cost around £40 million up to 2006. The enormous edifice is intended to house his collection of art and also includes his mausoleum. He is publicly outspoken and often unpopular, condemning his tenants as "scum" and engaging in a long running feud with the Ramblers' Association, over access to the land around his mansion.

In July 2002 he was sentenced to ten years imprisonment for manslaughter. A former business associate of his, Mohammed Raja, had been shot and stabbed in 1999. Raja had been in the process of suing van Hoogstraten for fraud when he was killed. Evidence pointed to the two murderers being hired by van Hoogstraten. He was found not guilty of murder but was convicted of manslaughter. He was given leave to appeal in February 2003 and the conviction was overturned in July 2003 at the Court of Appeal, due to a flaw in jury instructions in the Old Bailey trial. On December 19, 2005 the family of Raja, in a civil action against van Hoogstraten, were awarded £6 million by Mr Justice Lightman "on the balance of probabilities" "that the recruitment of the two thugs was for the purpose of murdering Mr Raja and not merely frightening or hurting him".

He is a close associate of Robert Mugabe and in 2005 announced plans to take over a major Zimbabwe bank. Despite Mugabe's sometime allegiancy to Marxist-Leninism, van Hoogenstraten has described his own politics as "to the right of Attila the Hun".

He has four sons and one daughter by three different mothers: Rhett, Alex, Britannia, Richmond, and Orrie.

[edit] Public opinion

According to BBC News, judges have variously referred to him as a "bully" and an "emissary of Beelzebub".
The 1989 Carter The Unstoppable Sex Machine hit single Sheriff Fatman includes references to a slum fictional landlord described thus: "Now he's moving up onto second base.. behind Nicholas Van Wotsisface" as becoming London's second worst landlord.