The tributes were fulsome and lavishly generous, understandably so for someone celebrated by movers and shakers for his erudition and style, a man whose enviably packed address book was matched only by his conspicuous consumption.
For his many friends, the premature death in 2017 of entrepreneur Sir David Tang was a loss they felt keenly.
Hollywood stars, models, celebrities and royals queued up to pay homage to his qualities in their own quirky way.
Australian actor Russell Crowe celebrated his Hong Kong-born friend as ‘witty, charming, intellectual, salacious, hilarious, loving and funny as f***’; while Naomi Campbell called him ‘the man who lived life to the fullest’.
Ever the eccentric, Sarah, Duchess of York described 63-year-old Tang as ‘my Brother Sun’ to her ‘Sister Moon’.
Others recalled the bon viveur’s extravagant, money-no-object lifestyle.
What none of these eulogies mentioned was that this colourful life is said to have been funded by a giant fraud.
Six months after his demise, reports suggested that far from being a billionaire socialite — the label he grandly played up to with his limousines, private jets and first-class everything — by the end of his life Sir David was almost penniless.
Naomi Campbell and David Tang at a book launch in 2016
This emerged after a sale of his personal effects, including a gift from Prince Charles, raised not quite half a million pounds at a Christie’s auction, begging questions about how the dazzling Tang dynasty had been brought to a state of ruin.
By this time, his spectacular £9 million waterfront home in Hong Kong, where he and second wife Lucy loved to entertain, had gone, along with the family townhouse in Belgravia.
Now, in an extraordinary twist, it is claimed Tang’s legendary opulence was founded not on his business ingenuity but apparently on stealing from the companies of which he was a director.
The sensational allegations — first revealed by the Mail’s Richard Eden yesterday — have been made by ex-Guards officer and oil tycoon Algy Cluff in the latest volume of his memoirs, Off The Cluff, to be published next week.
In the book, Cluff writes that after Tang’s death it emerged that ‘for many years he had been plundering the assets of various companies without the knowledge of the shareholders in order to fund his mytho-maniacal life.
‘The pressure of sustaining this systematic fraud for 20 years must have been terrible and presumably hastened his death.’
Tang, who wrote a rich man’s agony column for the Financial Times, died after a lengthy battle with liver cancer.
Cluff, who gave Tang his first job in 1980, has no illusions as to why his protégé — whom he says possessed a ‘predatory celebrity fixation’ — may have succumbed to criminality.
‘David,’ he writes, ‘possessed exceptional gifts, but also two fatal flaws . . . these were a disarming but ultimately destructive obsession to be not only a celebrity, but also the peer of the grandest in the land.
‘Keeping up with the [Dukes of] Marlboroughs, the [super-rich] Keswicks and the [land-owning] Northumberlands was beyond his financial abilities and led to his second flaw — gambling — which merely compounded the problem, leaving him to adopt less acceptable tactics.’
Somehow Tang, who managed to remain friends with both Princess Diana and Sarah, Duchess of York after the royal sisters-in-law fell out, found himself in financial difficulty
Yesterday, Cluff, 81, was reluctant to speak more of the allegations, observing merely that: ‘I seem to have stirred up a hornet’s nest.’
But friends of the former owner of The Spectator magazine, said he was ‘very much’ standing by his claims. I understand the allegations refer in particular to two companies set up by Tang, The China Club, a plush establishment with a Michelin-star restaurant housed on the top of the old Bank of China building in Hong Kong, and the Pacific Cigar Company, the exclusive distributor in the Far East of Havana cigars.
Both have been highly successful and are still trading. According to one figure aware of the scandal, the allegations date back to the 1990s.
Somehow Tang, who managed to remain friends with both Princess Diana and Sarah, Duchess of York after the royal sisters-in-law fell out, found himself in financial difficulty.
‘My only explanation is that he wanted to live the life of a plutocrat but didn’t have
