Amber Harrison’s London past

Amber Harrison says man who made new allegations about her past life in ­London is “telling things selectively’’.

Amber Harrison was in a relationship with Seven boss Tim Worner.

Amber Harrison, the former Seven West Media employee who triggered a storm in December by exposing her sexual ­relationship with the broadcaster’s chief executive, Tim Worner, is facing fresh allegations that thousands of pounds went missing on her watch when she was employed by a high-end bathroom company in ­London.

Amber Harrison near her Melbourne home. Picture: John Grainger

Staff at the company told The Australian that Ms Harrison dis­appeared from the company in 2001 after nearly £10,000 went missing. When the claims were put to her this week, Ms Harrison hit back. “I’ve never heard these allegations,” she said. “The timing is telling, and I strongly contest them.”

What is not in dispute is that for about four months in 2001, Ms Harrison worked for The Water Monopoly, a northwest London company that supplies bathrooms to London’s elite, including British aristocracy.

Managing director Justin Homewood claimed he filed a ­report with London police after what he alleges was her disappearance from the firm, where she was working as an ­administrative ­assistant. “She caused us a great deal of grief, upset and financial harm when I really could have done without it, when we were struggling as a business,” he told The Australian.

“I would put everything I own on the line, and my life, on the fact I’m telling the honest truth. I have nothing to gain from this, apart from my moral compass.”

Ms Harrison described the claims as “a grubby attempt to ­defame me”.

Accountant Jennie Staunton, managing director Justin Homewood and plumber Dave Ripp at The Water Monopoly in London. Picture: Andrew Parsons / i-Images

An internal audit conducted at The Water Monopoly after Ms Harrison failed to return from her 2001 Christmas break alleged unauthorised spending on several fronts under her watch, including the secret cashing of company cheques, unauthorised use of the company’s HSBC credit card and its cab charge account, and unauthorised use of the company’s petty cash account. In Mr Homewood’s version of events, Ms Harrison’s period with The Water Monopoly makes for a colourful tale. He claims she repeatedly projected a glamorous lifestyle, alleging she claimed her father was a hotel tycoon and that she moonlighted as a successful hand model.

Mr Homewood said he recognised Ms Harrison from photographs in Australian newspapers during the recent Seven media scandal involving Mr Worner.

“She wore glasses back in the day, and she’s definitely smart­ened herself up a bit,” he said. “But it was 1000 per cent Amber.”

He was backed up by Dave Ripp, a long-term plumber and ­engineer with The Water Monopoly. “I’d never forget the name after what happened,” he said. “And when I first saw the picture, I was just like ‘It’s her’.

“She was introduced as the Australian girl who was coming to work for us. That’s her: 100 per cent.”

Mr Ripp said part of the reason he remembered her so well was the shock of her departure, amid the alleged disappearance of the funds from the business. “She seemed like the sort of person you’d want to work with,” he said. “I was shocked, genuinely. We didn’t have a lot of money in those days.”

It is the second claim of alleged unauthorised use of company funds involving Ms Harrison since the scandal about her relationship with Mr Worner broke.

An internal Deloitte report alleged extensive unauthorised use of her corporate credit card at Seven to pay for international flights, luxury hotels and flowers for relatives and friends.

Mr Homewood said he filed the police report on March 12, 2002, giving a comprehensive account of his claims, together with supporting documentation.

He returned to his local police station last month, 15 years later, to check that the case remained open with the London Metropolitan Police. He said police confirmed this, and he was given the case file number for future reference. It is understood the file was updated to take account of recent Australian media reports about Ms Harrison.

Mr Homewood has now ­requested a copy of the report he filed. “I’m just waiting to see whether the CID will be able to ­recover any money,” he said. “I doubt it. But she (Ms Harrison) sort of needs to know that if she comes back into this country, then the police have some questions to ask her.”

Seven CEO Tim Worner. Picture: Britta Campion

However, Ms Harrison told The Australian she believed his ­filing of the police report had nothing to do with how she managed money at the company. “He’s angry at me for whatever reason that’s got nothing to do with his company finances.”

She also claimed she had been able to enter Britain several times unimpeded: “I’ve been back to London a number of times up until 2015, and I’ve never heard of it (the police report).”

Mr Homewood claimed Ms Harrison had extensive involvement in the day-to-day running of The Water Monopoly. “She wasn’t an accountant, but she would be in control with VAT returns, petty cash and a bit of the banking, to my stupidity (sic),” he said. “She was responsible for preparing everything for the accounts.”

While acknowledging she had some involvement with petty cash, Ms Harrison claimed Mr Homewood had exaggerated her role at his company. “I was a four-month temp — I didn’t have that sort of authority,” she said. “I made the teas and coffees.” She recalled, for example, making a cup of tea for Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour.

Ms Harrison, 24 at the time, worked there between September and December 2001.

Internal records covering Ms Harrison’s period at The Water Monopoly suggest it declared money taken totalling £9850.94: a cashed cheque for £3600, unauthorised credit card transactions of almost £2125, and a further shortfall of £4126 in petty cash.

However, these sums were mitigated by some money being paid back by the banks because their own procedures were not followed. The company received total refunds from its banks of £3812, due primarily to proven misuse of both the corporate cheque account and credit card.

One of these refunds was for £1800, half the value of the £3600 cheque alleged to have been cashed by Ms Harrison. The reason given for the amount refunded was that HSBC accepted half of the responsibility for the loss of money.

The refunds reduced the losses from bad debts for The Water Monopoly’s parent company, The Empire Line Ltd. The company declared bad debts of £6040 for the year to March 31, 2002, its ­official accounts show.

The management accountant who conducted the internal audit after Ms Harrison’s sudden departure, Jennie Staunton, was initially called in to help out with the company’s VAT returns. She said the company had not initially suspected money was missing.

She quickly found it difficult to even start on the accounts because the company’s paperwork was in a mess. “No accounting had been done at all for October, ­November and December 2001,” she said. “The whole thing was just a mess. There were just piles of ­invoices, sort of piles of everything. The only book that had been done was the petty cash book.”

Ms Staunton alleged her analysis uncovered a practice in which “a cheque (was cashed), and then a proportion but not all would go into the petty cash book. But the rest of the money from the cheque was nowhere to be seen. By the time she left, the petty cash was about £4000 short.”

Mr Homewood and Ms Staunton have alleged the refunds from the banks were given because goods had been purchased on the corporate credit card and delivered to Ms Harrison’s London home address in Edbrooke Road, Maida Vale, rather than to the office, the registered card address. “If goods are not shipped to the billing ­address of the credit card, the banks are liable,” she said.

As Ms Staunton sifted through the paperwork, she alleges it emerged there were unauthorised transactions using the corporate credit card number and the company’s cab charge ­account, right up to the day of Ms Harrison’s departure from Britain.

Ms Staunton claims Ms Harrison’s taxi fare to the airport was charged to the cab charge account, while a flight to Miami on the same day had been charged to Mr Homewood’s corporate card.

Mr Homewood said: “I took that as a final slap in the face.”

Ms Harrison has maintained Mr Homewood was fully aware of when and why she flew to Florida.

“The flight to Miami was to get me out of town,” she says.

“Justin had his reasons for wanting to do that.”

Ms Harrison has also questioned why it took Mr Homewood from when she left the firm in ­December 2001 until March 2002 to report the loss of funds.

Mr Homewood and Ms Staunton say he did not take the action of filing the police report lightly. “It is a criminal offence to file a report that you know to be false,’’ Ms Staunton said. “Why on earth would he waste his time and money getting me to compile a schedule and prepare the paperwork for the report?”

With regards to why the investigation took more than two months, Ms Staunton said: “The reason it was not reported until March was that it took a long time to unravel the mess that Amber Harrison left behind her, bearing in mind also that Water Monopoly was not the only company I worked for.”

Ms Staunton said Mr Homewood was prompted to find out about what had happened to Ms Harrison in Australia by an un­expected question from a bank teller less than two months ago, which revived memories of what had happened 15 years ago. “He was in the bank, and they said to him: ‘Would you like a company credit card?’ Well, as it happens, we haven’t had a company credit card (since 2001). Anyway, he said: ‘No, no, I’ve been burnt on that once before.’ But he thought, ‘I wonder what happened to her’, and he googled her.”

What Mr Homewood found among all of the detail of Ms Harrison’s affair with Mr Worner was a report in Sydney’s Daily Telegraph of the findings of a forensic accountant’s investigation into her spending on her corporate ­credit card, conducted by Deloitte at Seven’s request in 2014. That ­report identified allegations of unauthorised expenditure on her corporate card, similar to what Mr Homewood is alleging.

Ms Harrison started her tenure with The Water Monopoly soon after another stint in London working for Tamara Ingram, the former executive chairman of global ad agency Saatchi & Saatchi.

When still with Saatchi in March 2001, she wrote a first-­person piece for London’s Independent newspaper about working for Ms Ingram. “I came here for a day’s temp work last September, and Tam asked me to stay on,” she wrote. “I was so flattered. It turned out perfectly, because Tam was looking for a PA, and I was looking to settle down and get what my Dad calls a ‘real’ job. I’m from Australia, although I have British ­nationality, and I’ve been over here for a year.

“I still can’t believe how lucky I am to have come into a company like this, and to be working for someone as dynamic as Tam.”

That stint ended around July 2001 when Ms Ingram left Saatchi for another top ad role.

Mr Homewood said Ms Harrison started work at The Water Monopoly in September 2001, but as she settled into her job, he alleges his new administrative assistant mentioned some unusual activities. “She used to go away quite a lot on long weekends or weekends, and then she used to say she was going on hand modelling assignments,” he said. “We did sort of think she goes away a lot for a ­single person on her salary. And then she’d come back, and say: ‘I’ve been on a hand modelling ­assignment and that’s how I’ve paid for the trip.’

“It’s one of those things you don’t question because it’s so ­bizarre.”

Ms Harrison claims Mr Homewood had wildly misinterpreted a joke she made. “There’s probably 100 people who’ve heard me say I’m a hand model, because I love a particular Seinfeld episode where George Costanza became a hand model,” she said.

“It’s just ridiculous, and out of context. I’m a huge Seinfeld fan, and it was said in jest.”

Mr Homewood alleges ­another claim she made concerned her ­father’s wealth. “She said her ­father was a multi-millionaire, and owned strings of ­hotels in Australia, mostly in Melbourne. So we took her at her word.”

He also asserts Ms Harrison’s failure to return to The Water Monopoly in January 2002 after the firm’s Christmas shutdown was initially shrouded in mystery. “Before Christmas, she was quite down,” Mr Homewood said. “We were a little bit concerned about her. When she didn’t come back after Christmas, the first thing we thought of was that she’d done herself some harm.”

He headed to her Maida Vale flat. “Another colleague and I gained access into her flat — which was very easy to do.” What they found alarmed them. “She had self-help books scattered around, she had a card from someone or other and there was one solitary sad Christmas card — you walked in and said, ‘poor girl’.”

Mr Homewood claimed the strangest item was a note that had been slipped under her door, ­ostensibly from a Formula One mechanic. “The mechanic had supposedly written this letter to her saying: ‘I can’t be with you, and it’s over between us,’ ” Mr Homewood said.

“So I tracked this guy down in the Formula One — I can’t remember his name, it was 15 years ago. (But) they weren’t going out. He knew of her, but they met at a party or something like that and that was it. He just said (to me): ‘I’m not going out with her, we don’t see each other, and I definitely didn’t write that note.’

“He was quite freaked out by the whole thing.”

Ms Harrison is angered by Mr Homewood’s claim. “It is a most bizarre part of the story,” she says. “This is a mad man’s rantings, it’s just madness. The guy’s admitted to breaking into my house, and he’s selectively telling things that were in my house that even I don’t remember. At that point, it is clear I had moved out.”

Mr Homewood has claimed that at this point, he started to investigate transactions on the company’s account. “So we started to do some more digging around, and it then came to light that she’d booked a flight to Miami on my company credit card. We knew she was in Miami.”

He started ringing hotels in Miami, Florida. “We tracked her down in one of the ­hotels on the phone. It had come to light that (money was missing), and I wanted that money back. So I thought the best thing to do was to track her down and ask for my money.”

Mr Homewood claimed a call from a colleague was eventually transferred through to a room. “A woman answered the phone, and the guy from my office said it’s so and so from The Water Monopoly,” he said. “The woman on the other end of the phone immediately hung up.”

Ms Harrison claimed the call to Miami never happened. “I never heard from them again (after leaving Britain), and I never thought about them again,” she said.

Mr Homewood claimed the next step was to try to track down her father in Melbourne, whom he still believed was a hotel-owning millionaire. “I started to ring around the hotels in Melbourne,” he said. “I got to one particular hotel, I can’t remember the name of it, and I said, ‘I’d like to speak to Mr Harrison. I thought, if he’s a multi-millionaire, then I’ve got a chance of getting my money back. So I phone this hotel, and I said ‘Can I speak to Mr Harrison’.

“They said, we’ve got someone working here (by that name). I said, ‘He won’t be working there, he owns your hotel’.”

In his version of events, Mr Homewood claims the operator replied that this Mr Harrison definitely did not own the hotel — he worked in hotel maintenance.

“It was her father, and I managed to speak to (him). And I said, if I don’t get my money back, I’m going to go to the police and reporting the crime, and she won’t be allowed back in this country. She’s in Miami, and she’s told us a load of untruths. And he just said: ‘I’m not responsible for her, I’m not giving you your money back.’ And I said: ‘Well, that’s it, I’ll go to the police.’ He said: ‘That’s fine.’ And then we ended up calling them (the police). That’s when I reported a crime.”

Once again, Ms Harrison ­remembers a different version of events, saying she “strongly contested” Mr Homewood’s ­account. “In the call to my father, Justin was off his face ranting and raving about me being a slut and a whore,” she said. “My father said he never mentioned anything about money going missing. (He) said he was almost incoherent. He was angry and he was aggressive.”

According to Mr Homewood, the whole experience left him feeling worn out. “She did a lot of damage to me at the time, financially,” he said. “I felt violated, and like a mug. It was just a really distressing time. It was incredibly disruptive.

“From a moral point of view — and that’s why I’m doing this, ­solely from a moral point of view — I don’t think she should be ­allowed to get away with that.”

Ms Staunton, who has run The Water Monopoly’s books since the Harrison episode 15 years ago, said the experience changed Mr Homewood. “He’s still trusting, even now, but he’s a lot more careful,” she said. “He initially thought something awful had happened. Then he was annoyed and angry.”

The Australian is not suggesting the allegations against Ms Harrison are true, only that they have been made. Ms Harrison says her departure was no surprise: “I left because I was a temp, and I had always intended to leave around that time. The intention was always to leave. I just did a few months’ temping before I left the country. I’ve been accused of everything under the sun in the last four months, so this is kind of the latest instalment.”