Tycoon Warren Lichtenstein is dragging an owner of the Tampa Bay Rays, Andrew Cader, into his costly legal battle with exgirlfriend Annabelle Bond, by accusing Cader of conspiring to defraud him by aiding Bond to inflate her required child-support costs.
According to a suit filed yesterday in Manhattan federal court, Lichtenstein claims Cader is Bond’s “longtime love,” and Bond — the English heiress and adventurer mother of Lichtenstein’s 5-year-old — has pursued a massive child-support settlement to “improve upon her own already extraordinary life of leisure, luxury, privilege and modest fame.”
In the suit, Steel Partners’ Lichtenstein claims he agreed to purchase a home for Bond and his child in Britain, but Bond then “sought to take up permanent residence . . . half a world away” in Hong Kong. There, Bond, the daughter of former Vodafone and HSBC chairman Sir John Bond, moved into’s Cader $26,000-per-month rental.
The suit alleges Bond then filed for Lichtenstein to pay triple their British child-support agreement, “including rent on the . . . home leased by Mr. Cader” and that she’s not on the lease.
The suit claims Cader’s given Bond an additional $3.5 million, which Bond told Lichtenstein were “loans from her lover that she was obligated to repay,” but the suit says they are gifts to her.
Lichtenstein currently pays $41,800 a month in support, according to the suit, the “largest reported . . . ever rendered in Hong Kong.”
The suit says Cader’s former company Spear, Leeds & Kellogg was bought by Goldman Sachs for $7.5 billion, and paints Bond as having gone “from one millionaire lover to another, spending millions . . . of their money to support her lavish lifestyle and . . . [to] finance her litigation efforts.”
The suit seeks at least $200,000 and attorney’s fees. A rep for the Tampa Bay Rays and Bond did not return requests for comment.
Stanley S. Arkin, the legendary lawyer who is representing Lichtenstein, told us the suit “is all about how much [his client] cares for his daughter.”