Nicholas van Hoogstraten

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

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 began his property business in Bermuda with an initial investment of £1000, realised from the sale of his stamp collection.

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 a 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. Having described ramblers as "perverts" and "the absolute scum of the earth" he engaged in a long running feud with the Ramblers' Association over a right of way that crossed the land around Hamilton Palace - for more than 10 years and until recently, access was illegally obstructed with padlocked gates, barbed wire, industrial-grade refrigeration units, and a barn built astride the path.

He has previously described tenants in no less colourful terms. When a fire broke out in one of his properties, the five people who died were described as "lowlife, drug dealers, drug takers and queers - scum". He is known to have sent enforcers to collect overdue rent, and to have removed roofs and staircases in order to evict tenants. Publicly outspoken and widely loathed, some suspect his outrageous statements are a deliberate attempt at notoriety.

In July 2002 he was sentenced to ten years imprisonment for the manslaughter of Mohammed Raja, after being found not guilty of murder. A slum landlord and former business associate, Raja was shot and stabbed by two hired hitmen in 1999. Raja had been in the process of suing van Hoogstraten for fraud when he was killed. Evidence suggested the two hitmen were hired by van Hoogstraten. 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 at 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, after the court found 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 has been 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.