Hedge fund socialite sent agent 'to spy' on staff

In late November 2008, Tobin Gover, a top financial mathematician known to his friends as Sam, got a call through to his desk at work in Limassol, Cyprus.

The woman on the line - a new neighbour - wanted to know which parking Space was hers at the apartment block Mr Gover lived in with his wife, Laura Carminati, on Limassol's well-to-do eastern seafront.

The seemingly innocuous inquiry was, as Mr Gover has subsequently alleged, the beginning of an audacious spying operation conducted by the head of one of Europe's top hedge funds - Mr Gover's employer Ikos - against its own high-level staff.

The Govers' new neighbour - a woman purporting to be Laura Maria van Egmond, scion of Dutch nobility convalescing in Cyprus following a motoring accident - was in fact, Mr Gover claims in a UK court case, "a security consultant involved in covert close protection and undercover investigations ... trained in Israel" and "trained in unarmed combat".

"There is no doubt," alleges Mr Gover, that Ms Van Egmond - who within months went from being a regular yoga-buddy of his wife to a close family friend who spent Christmas with them and would be left alone to look after their infant son - was, in fact, Laura Merts, a Dutch spy, hired by Elena Ambrosiadou, head of Ikos and one of the world's wealthiest women.

The UK High Court has given judgment in Mr Gover's favour.

Ms Ambrosiadou filed no defence and has agreed to pay damages.

The accusations levelled against her are now set to reverberate around the hedge fund world.

For years, Greece-born Ms Ambrosiadou has cut a distinctive figure in some of Europe's most glamorous social circles as the head of one of the continent's most publicity shy - and lucrative - financial operators.

Ikos, which she founded in London two decades ago with her husband Martin Coward - one of the world's foremost financial mathematicians - has become one of international finance's most advanced market players, using vastly complex computer codes to trade financial instruments around the globe from its home in Cyprus at mind-boggling speeds.

The vast riches - hundreds of millions of dollars a year - that Ikos has generated for its founders have funded a lavish lifestyle. Ms Ambrosiadou is the owner of the largest sailing yacht in the world, the 300ft Maltese Falcon, and a regular face on the Monegasque social circuit. However, behind the public success, Ikos has been wracked for several years by the bitter estrangement of Ms Ambrosiadou and her husband, who was the architect of Ikos's computerised trading codes.

Notwithstanding Mr Coward's resignation from Ikos in late 2009, however - an event that came a year after Ms Ambrosiadou's decision to dismiss Mr Coward's entire research team, including Mr Gover - little about events at the firm has until now entered the public domain.

Mr Gover says the spying against him and others - which began while he was still employed at Ikos and continued long after it - was intended to gain information to "aid" litigation against him brought about since he left.

Relations between Mr Gover and Ms Ambrosiadou had already become "strained" while he worked at Ikos because of his refusal to sign an employment contract "which contained unreasonable restraint of trade clauses [and] failed to reflect agreements as to [my] profit share and other beneficial interests," Mr Gover's complaint says.

He had "begun to discuss the idea of creating a new investment management business with Dr Ho [another senior Ikos employee], which they would own and run jointly based in London".

Ms Merts was instructed by Ms Ambrosiadou "to secure by deceit information concerning [his] new business venture", he alleges.

Following his dismissal from Ikos in December 2008, proceedings against him for breach of contract and of fiduciary duty were commenced in Cyprus in January 2009.

They were later set aside in May 2010.

Dr Ho and 13 others were dismissed from the firm two days before Christmas without Mr Coward's knowledge, Mr Gover believes.

Surveillance activities lasted well after they had left and allegedly also involved a project codenamed "Operation Apollo", according to Mr Gover, in November and December 2009.

A security agency hired by Ms Ambrosiadou "commenced a large-scale surveillance operation in Monaco on 23 November 2009, targeting [Mr] Coward and others, with the aim of gathering evidence to be used in litigation. [He] and Dr Ho were in fact followed and photographed during their visit," Mr Gover's claim says.

Mr Gover is also defending legal actions brought by Ikos - as are several top employees, foremost among them Mr Coward.

Through court actions around Europe Ms Ambrosiadou has used her considerable fortune - and the financial weight of her firm - to aggressively silence her husband.

Mr Coward remains bound by a remarkable Cypriot legal injunction, taken out after his resignation, and enforceable in the UK, which prevents him from discussing absolutely anything to do with the firm he co-founded and of which he still owns half.

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