New flame: Steiner with model Patrycja Pyka
Ocado boss Tim Steiner is making public appearances with his girlfriend Patrycja Pyka
Her arrival on the scene will give pause for thought to Ocado shareholders
They have had a bumpy ride since it floated on the stock market in 2010
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His camp maintains he did not ‘dump’ wife Belinda for a younger model
Says there was a gap between the split and setting up home with Patrycja
Tycoon Steiner filed for divorce from wife Belinda citing unreasonable behaviour
Tim Steiner looked every inch the proud consort as he squired his young girlfriend around a party in London’s Mayfair.
There
was no question of the 46-year-old married chief executive of online
grocer Ocado trying to conceal his relationship with Patrycja Pyka, a
Polish lingerie model young enough to be his daughter. Quite the
opposite.
The
pair mingled happily with their fellow guests, posing for photographs
and sipping highballs, he in a dark suit and open-neck shirt, she in a
Chanel-style boucle jacket and pale trousers that clung to her enviable
curves.
Her
attire on this occasion was a far cry from the black lace body suit she
sported for her appearance in Flirt Magazine, a lads’ website devoted
to ‘hot models’, cars and gadgets.
Glamour: Patrycja Pyka, 27, pictured
reclining against the New York skyline wearing thigh-high stockings and
heels, is the model girlfriend of Ocado tycoon Tim Steiner
But
then, from the point of view of the dental hygiene graduate from the
coal-mining town of Myslowice in south Poland, this was no ordinary
party. The pair were guests at the launch last spring of The House of
Elemis, an opulent spa owned by Steiner Leisure, the beauty empire
founded by Tim’s great-grandfather.
For
him to openly parade Patrycja, 27, at a corporate event hosted by his
family’s old firm was tantamount to a declaration of her status as his
official partner. Being supplanted in such a public way will have been a
bitter blow for his soon-to-be ex-wife Belinda, 45.
But
the arrival of Patrycja on the scene will also give pause for thought
to shareholders in Ocado, who have had a bumpy ride since it floated on
the stock market in 2010.
Steiner,
a former Goldman Sachs banker who set up the firm in 2000 with friends
Jason Gissing and Jonathan Faiman, is the only one of the original trio
to remain at the company.
He
is a major shareholder with a 4.6 per cent stake — worth £86million —
provoking speculation he will have to sell a large chunk in a settlement
with Belinda, whom he is divorcing for her unreasonable behaviour.
Then
there is the delicate question of whether, amid the chaos of his
domestic situation, he can devote his full attention to running Ocado.
He is certainly facing plenty of distractions.
Unusually,
Tim and Patrycja are looking after the four teenage Steiner children —
three boys, including twins, and a girl, at a detached house in
Highgate, an affluent enclave in North London. Belinda is living in a
garden flat in nearby St John’s Wood.
Her
friends say she is distraught at being separated from her children. The
marriage, they say, cracked under the strain she felt at looking after a
growing family single-handed, while her husband worked round the clock
at Ocado. She is said to admit to having turned to alcohol to take the
edge off in the past.
Friends
of his, unsurprisingly, tell a different tale. Far from being a
work-obsessed, absent husband and father, they depict him as a man who
struggled for years to make his marriage work before finally throwing in
the towel more than three years ago.
His
camp maintains he did not ‘dump’ Belinda for a younger model, but that
there was a substantial gap between breaking with his wife and setting
up home with Patrycja.
Candidate: Miss Pyka has her hair slicked back and coolly fixes her heavily made up eyes at the camera
‘Tim
is a very good father. There has been a decade of difficulty at least.
It was not just about drink. He tried everything to sort out the
problems but they got worse. His friends think he is being dealt a very
poor hand,’ says one.
Regardless
of how the blame is apportioned, Tim Steiner’s messy private life is a
concern for investors, who would prefer him to concentrate on Ocado.
From the outset, after the three Ocado founders quit their jobs at
Goldman in 2000 with a bright idea for an online grocer, the company
looked like a roaring success.
With
products supplied exclusively by Waitrose, it rapidly established a
reputation as a quintessential middle-class grocer, luring shoppers with
its arborio rice and organic hummus.
Its
colourful, chunky vans were soon clogging streets all over the capital
as the likes of Samantha Cameron and Victoria Beckham tapped their
shopping lists into their laptops.
Hundreds
of thousands of families signed up for deliveries, and Ocado became as
much of a symbol of Middle England as an Aga or a pair of Hunter
wellies. While customers flocked in, however, profits proved elusive.
The company was loss-making for more than a decade and has only clawed modestly into the black in the past couple of years.
Tim and his fellow founders, however, did not wait to see an actual profit before extracting rich rewards from the company.
He
has received millions of pounds in salary and bonuses, despite the long
string of losses — and despite doubts among some City commentators
about Ocado’s future. Critics argue the business is at a crunch point in
its growth. The shares are down more than 35 per cent since last
summer.
Yet
the uncertainties of operating an online grocer in the cut-throat
British market have not proved any impediment to Tim accumulating a
treasure trove of more than £100million in cash and shares over his 15
years in charge.
Split: Tim
Steiner's camp maintains he did not ‘dump’ Belinda (pictured) for a
younger model, but that there was a substantial gap between breaking
with his wife and setting up home with Patrycja
To
put this in perspective, Ocado has made total profits before tax of
£19.1million in its entire existence. His assets include the former
family home, a sprawling mansion in North London, bought for £7.7
million in 2006 with a loan from HSBC Private Bank.
The
house, which is understood not to be occupied by either of the
Steiners, is now valued at just under £15.7 million on the online
property site Zoopla.
There
is also a holiday chalet in Courchevel in France. But Belinda’s lawyers
will have a beady eye on the real goldmine: the fortune he has amassed
from Ocado.
He
holds nearly 28 million shares, worth £86 million. Around half of these
are held in his own name and the rest are stashed in an offshore
vehicle, the Steiner 2008 Millennium Trust, based in the tax haven of
Nassau in the Bahamas.
He is a beneficiary of the trust along with other members of his family, but it is not known whether they include Belinda.
In
the past five years, he has received £15.4 million in pay and bonuses,
the bulk of it as performance-related share incentives rather than cash.
This
sum includes a whopping £5.9 million package for last year. Perks
include a chauffeur to ferry him to his company headquarters in an old
De Havilland aircraft factory in Hatfield, Hertfordshire.
There have also been judiciously timed share sales that have swelled the Steiner wallet.
The
Trust offloaded £5 million of shares back in February 2011 — a move
which was likely to alarm shareholders and City observers, and drew
comment in the media. Controversially, the Trust chose to announce the
move to the Stock Exchange at 6pm on a Friday, when most analysts had
left their desks for the weekend.
At
the time, Steiner said the investment fund is a blind trust that he
does not control, and claimed the idea that he was trying to bury the
transaction was ‘preposterous’.
Whatever
the reason, the timing was extremely opportune, because the following
Monday £100 million was wiped off the company’s value after Waitrose
(which, though it supplies Ocado’s products, is a commercial rival)
announced plans to beef up its online business.
There was no question of the
46-year-old married chief executive of online grocer Ocado trying to
conceal his relationship with Patrycja Pyka, a Polish lingerie model
young enough to be his daughter. Quite the opposite
Ocado
divides opinion in the City as to whether it has come up with a
genuinely viable business model. What few shoppers will realise is that,
over the past few years, it has quietly morphed from a grocer into a
‘service provider’.
Three years ago, it signed a lucrative 25-year contract with supermarket group Morrisons to look after its online business.
But
this tie-up, negotiated by Morrisons’ previous CEO before he left under
a cloud, is widely viewed as being far too favourable to Ocado, and is
expected to be renegotiated. A new element added to the original deal
has let Morrisons off the large cost of buying equipment for a new
warehouse.
Steiner has also missed his target of doing a similar deal with an overseas retailer by the end of last year.
‘Ocado
has to end up with a satisfactory negotiation with Morrisons on a new
way forward, or I struggle to see how it can sell its services to other
retailers,’ says retail expert Clive Black of Shore Capital.
‘Its
business model might finally make sense, but only if it can get an
agreement. It’s fair to say the company is at a critical moment — this
is high-stakes stuff.’
Black,
who has been a long-term critic of Ocado, is advising investors to sell
the shares. Tim Steiner regards his divorce and new relationship as an
entirely private matter, but with so much at stake shareholders have a
legitimate interest in whether his mind is on the job.
‘We
look at episodes like Tim Steiner’s on a case-by-case basis,’ says one
City money manager. ‘If he was in a relationship with a 40-year-old
lawyer, no one would care, but because he has taken up with a much
younger model, it raises questions about his judgment.
‘This
is undeniably a strange story, but in this instance I am convinced he
is on top of the business. He is not a charming man to be around, but as
an internet pioneer his achievement is pretty extraordinary.’
Others
in the City, where the story is being endlessly picked apart over lunch
tables, say the Ocado boss is being viewed with a good deal of
sympathy. They feel the difficulties in his private life were testing,
and that he had made huge efforts over many years to salvage his
marriage.
But
with trouble at home, as well as the pressure of making the numbers add
up at work, it is perhaps no surprise if Tim’s mind drifted to figures
of a different kind.
Before Patrycja met the shopping tycoon, she was an aspiring model whose portfolio included a series of seductive shots.
One shows her in thigh-high stockings and stilettos with the New York skyline in the background.
In
another, she leans back in a chair wearing a form-fitting corset. A
third depicts her long legs splayed as she bestrides a fire escape.
After
finishing school in 2008, she seems to have acquired a taste for the
high life. In 2010, she holidayed in Ibiza with British DJ Nicholas
Duku, who advertises for ‘image models’ to work for him while he
performs in venues around the world.
In
adverts posted online, the DJ makes clear he is looking for ‘stunning’
women who will party with him and sell VIP packages to his shows.
After
graduating from university, she trained to become a dental hygienist
between 2011 and 2013. She ran for office in a local election in her
hometown in 2014 on a platform of opening more pubs and clubs.
Patrycja Pyka is a Polish lingerie model and dental hygiene graduate from the coal-mining town of Myslowice in south Poland
One
of her former classmates says: ‘I’m not that surprised by what’s
happened. She went abroad, had other experiences, I guess like a lot of
Poles from small towns do. Perhaps I’m a bit surprised about the
millionaire.’
It is not hard to divine what the balding, diminutive Steiner sees in leggy Patrycja — but it will prove a costly liaison.
‘Definitely,
in this instance the wife will be looking for a multi-million-pound
settlement,’ says Izzy Walsh, a divorce specialist at leading family law
firm Vardags.
‘It
is a long marriage that has produced four children. She has suffered
the same trials and tribulations as him while the business was being
built up.
‘Regardless
of who the children live with, she will be expecting support for
herself, which would be relatively large because she has been out of the
workplace for a long time and is in her 40s.’
While
both parties have declined to comment, the settlement will almost
certainly run into the tens of millions of pounds, and could force Tim
into a substantial share sale, as has been the case in other
high-profile City divorce cases.
‘Tim
will have to pay Belinda millions, but it is not something he is losing
sleep over. That’s what happens in this kind of divorce,’ says one
friend.
‘The
idea this could distract him from the company or harm the business in
some way is rubbish. It is not entirely unknown for a successful guy to
have a very young girlfriend. Whatever else you say about Tim, he is
totally focused on the business.’
He will need to be. The company wins plaudits from its devoted customers, but the UK grocery scene is ultra-competitive.
The
traditional supermarkets are expanding their own internet operations,
and Ocado faces a new threat from U.S. giant Amazon, which has ambitious
plans to sell more food and household goods in the UK.
Whatever
the future holds, the company he founded has brought Tim Steiner vast
wealth, but there has been a tremendous personal cost. He must be hoping
that his brightly coloured Ocado vans will finally deliver some
happiness to him and Patrycja, as well as yet more large bundles of
cash.
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