[imagesource: Rex Features]

The Barclay brothers are extremely rich and even more secretive.

For a long time, they’ve managed to keep most of their dealings under wraps, particularly regarding how they amassed and maintained their $8,4 billion fortune.

What we do know is that they built up their expansive empire by buying and selling off breweries, hotels, shipping lines, and oil and gas fields.

The identical twins also once owned The Daily Telegraph and the London Ritz Hotel and lived in a castle in the tax haven of the Channel Islands.

That was until 2014 when the siblings had a massive falling out.

Since Frederick Barclay’s ex-wife has taken him to court over their divorce settlement, details of this and more are slowly emerging.

In a nutshell, Frederick faces jail time for refusing to pay what he owes his ex-wife after their divorce, and she has revealed details of the fallout between him and his brother, per Fortune.

Frederick finally agreed to hand control of the family business to David, a move he called “the greatest mistake I’ve ever made”.

The court heard how that happened:

On the first day of the hearing, a London court was told that the two brothers had a fist fight on their co-owned luxury yacht over who got control of their U.K. business empire.

“They were punching each other,” Hiroko Barclay, Frederick’s ex-wife, said in court.

Here are the twin brothers outside Buckingham Palace after receiving their Knighthoods for their support of medical research in October 2000:

Then Frederick’s ex-wife threw him further under the bus:

Hiroko Barclay is attempting to send Frederick Barclay to prison over his nonpayment of the 100 million pounds ($120 million) she is due in their divorce settlement.

“Frederick says he cannot pay. He says he has no money. I do not believe him. It is not that he cannot pay, but that he will not pay,” she said.

Hiroko also accused her ex-husband of transferring his wealth to their daughter and a complex series of trusts “in order to avoid paying any tax”:

…“He’s not allowed to have a bank account because he’s not paying tax in the U.K.,” Hiroko, who was married to Frederick for 34 years, told the court. “He’s not allowed to have assets…all not to pay tax in the U.K.”

Hiroko’s lawyers also revealed that Frederick is the principal beneficiary of a trust, controlled by relatives, that receives funds from loan notes worth $653 million.

The couple divorced in May last year, at which point Frederick was ordered to pay the divorce payment in split portions over two years.

The settlement was one of the biggest divorce awards in English legal history – the most ludicrous being the one between Farkhad Akhmedov and his now ex-wife, Tatiana Akhmedova.

Frederick has done well to avoid paying up, but now faces potential jail time, which his lawyer admitted made him want to comply out of his “abject fear of prison”.

Meanwhile, Hiroko (above) is sure he is trying “to string things out” and hide “behind a web of complex structures” to get out of paying the settlement until either she or Frederick dies.

Frederick is blaming a lack of liquidity of his assets for not paying up immediately, though, with his lawyer saying he has been desperate to get the funds but does not, unfortunately, have direct control of them.

Convenient.

[sources:fortune&bloomberg]