Runaway heiress who has been hunted by private detectives found
Aside from the £5,000 purple denim Chanel outfit and the clutch of designer Italian greyhounds at her Dior-clad feet, Ekaterina Eliazarovna Svetikova Barrett couldn’t have looked less like a multi-millionaire as she pottered along a palm tree-lined Monaco street last week.
The 67-year-old, who was born in the former Soviet Union but is now a British citizen, claims to be a multi-millionaire with a trust fund in Liechtenstein.
But, as the Mail exclusively revealed last week, Barrett is also a convicted fraudster and, last October, a High Court judge in London ordered her to hand over £1.65 million after she failed to pay a settlement following a dispute over her alleged failure to repay multiple loans.
Fettered by a worldwide freezing order up to the value of £1.8 million and the subject of multiple investigations by private detectives hired by an angry creditor, the Mail has now tracked down this elusive woman to a £19.2 million Monte Carlo apartment with a terrace boasting views across the Mediterranean in a bid to find out why, given her apparently flabbergasting wealth, she has failed to pay up what she owes.
More, in a moment, of the astonishing response she gave us, for an ongoing investigation by the Mail has uncovered an extraordinary tale which stretches back at least two decades and has been played out across some of Europe’s wealthiest enclaves.
And while Barrett has been rubbing shoulders with millionaires and celebrities — among them Prince Albert of Monaco and actress Sharon Stone — she has also encountered trouble with the law in Austria where, as we shall see, she was convicted of fraud back in 2004.
Certainly, some of those who know her paint a very different picture to that presented by a woman who wore a £50,000 floor-length Chanel gown when she stepped out at a royal charity gala at the Prince’s Palace in Monte Carlo two years ago.
‘Ekaterina is not what she seems,’ says Bridget Hutchcroft, who says she counted Barrett as a friend before lending her vast sums of money — sums which are yet to be returned.
‘She convinced me she was fabulously wealthy,’ adds the 63-year-old businesswoman, who lives and works in London.
‘She told me she was a multi-multi-millionaire and, judging by her lifestyle, there was no reason to doubt it. She was charming and believable and I was completely taken in.’
This jaw-dropping, colourful tale begins at the Pandora Dress Agency in Knightsbridge, where, for years, owner Bridget has bought and sold second-hand couture designs, working with wealthy customers including the late Princess Diana and Hollywood legend Ava Gardner.
It was here, one fateful day back in July 2017, that a well-heeled, heavily made-up Barrett first came trotting through the door with her Italian greyhounds.
Already an established customer selling high-end items via Pandora — including outfits costing thousands from Chanel, Alexander McQueen and Valentino — on this occasion she and animal-lover Bridget bonded over her designer pooches, Luca and Luis.
‘I love dogs,’ says Bridget. ‘I said: ‘If you ever need a babysitter, like if you’re going to Harrods or whatever, then bring them here.’ ‘
Over the next few months, the women became friends. During that time, says Bridget, Barrett —known as Katrina, Katya or Katty to friends — frequently flaunted her wealth, taking her around town in a chauffeur-driven Bentley and inviting her to her luxurious apartment in Curzon Square in Mayfair.
She says Barrett dropped into conversations that she owned five properties in Monaco worth £100 million. She also took Bridget to visit two further apartments in Grosvenor Square in London’s Belgravia which Ekaterina said she planned to buy, despite eye-watering price tags of £25 million each.
‘Ekaterina never explained where her money came from,’ says Bridget. ‘But I did believe that she had this huge trust fund she told me about.’ She made no mention, of course, of her criminal past in Vienna, where she was arrested after posing as an oil firm agent to con victims into giving her €200,000.
A police mugshot of Barrett, looking utterly unlike her usually immaculate self, appeared in a Viennese newspaper.
Back in 2017, Bridget knew none of this. At the time she met Barrett, she wasn’t well.
‘I’d had time off work because I’d had a breakdown,’ she says. ‘That’s not a good time to meet somebody like Ekaterina. She knew I’d been going through a difficult time. I was on quite heavy medication. She homes in and she’s very adept at what she does.’
According to Bridget’s High Court claim, it was while at Barrett’s swanky Mayfair apartment that the alleged heiress took a phone call and, after she’d hung up, announced that the trustee who managed her Liechtenstein-based trust fund had died. For a short period of time, she said, she wouldn’t be able to access her funds.
After asking if the shop owed her any outstanding money from the sale of her items, she begged Bridget for a short-term loan of £7,500.
‘I agreed to give it to her,’ says Bridget. ‘She was very persuasive and I felt pressurised and it just never occurred to me that she wouldn’t pay it back.’
And Bridget told the court that sizeable loan was just the tip of a hefty cash iceberg. She claimed that soon Barrett was asking for half a million to pay top-notch lawyers involved in her ongoing divorce from her British husband.
‘She just kept asking and asking,’ says Bridget. ‘She said she didn’t have anyone else except me. She was either begging or desperate or hysterical.’
Bridget says she loaned Barrett a further £540,020, and while she kept asking for the money to be repaid, further loans followed after promises from Barrett that Bridget would get her money back faster if she helped her out again.
‘She said that the money was tied up in a trust; she kept waving bits of paper at me. One time she offered me a share in her Monaco apartment. If I pressed it, she could get really nasty.’
Fast-forward a year and, by November 2018, Bridget says she had handed over £1,368,524.19 and risked losing her home.
‘I couldn’t believe it when I sat down and worked it out,’ says Bridget. ‘I called her and said: ‘You have got to pay me back, Ekaterina.’
The answer she received sent a chill down her spine.
‘She said: ‘The next time you ask I will not pay you for a hundred years.’
‘I was just so upset. Not over the money, strangely, but because I had trusted her, ridiculously so. I just wanted to hide away.’
Bridget first turned to the courts for help by launching a civil claim in March 2020.
Barrett responded by denying that any of the money she’d received was a loan, claiming that the money from Bridget was paid to her for the sale of luxury items from her couture collection as well as reimbursement for trips to Monaco. She claimed that it was Bridget who still owed her further money.
However, in 2021, Barrett signed a settlement, agreeing to pay £1.4 million within 14 days to resolve the case. After she failed to do so, a further court order was issued in October last year, ordering her to pay £1,665,560.59, including legal costs.
So what do we know of Ekaterina Eliazarovna Svetikova Barrett?
Inquiries by the Mail reveal that she was born in 1956, three years after Stalin’s death and during Nikita Khrushchev’s time as Russian premier, in what was Voroshilovgrad and is now Luhansk in eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region.
The city was seized by pro-Russian separatists in 2014 and annexed by Russia in late 2022. Until she was given a British passport in 2010, she described herself as a citizen of the former Soviet republic of Azerbaijan.
Her Ukrainian mother, Ludmila, lives in a small and modest apartment in Netanya, an Israeli resort city 20 miles from Tel Aviv. Bridget once travelled there with Barrett: ‘You could see there was no money. And I remember thinking, how come your mother’s living like this? She was living a very ordinary life.’
Barrett’s father Eliazar was born in Novosibirsk, in Siberia, but later moved to Munich with his second wife. There, despite Ekaterina’s boasts of his fabulous wealth, one acquaintance recalls having to sleep on the sofa during a visit because his apartment was so small.
Barrett claimed to have a wealthy businessman brother in Moscow and that her Liechtenstein trust fund was set up by her wealthy Russian grandfather.
Some of those who have crossed paths with Barrett have likened her to Anna Sorokin, the Russian-born fraudster who posed as a wealthy German heiress, fleeced New York high society and inspired the hit Netflix series Inventing Anna.
Among those who make that comparison is her 62-year-old British ex-husband Mitch Barrett, an artist who once worked as a model for the likes of Giorgio Armani and Levi’s in the 1990s.
He was a mature student studying film and screenwriting at Bournemouth and Poole College when he first met Barrett in 2000. Suffering from depression, he had taken a year out and returned to London for modelling work.
They were introduced by friends at the five-star Grosvenor House Hotel on London’s Park Lane, where she was living in a suite while dividing her time between London and Dubai. He says that Barrett wined and dined him, bought him clothes from Versace and took him to Mayfair casinos such as Les Ambassadeurs as well as private gambling club Aspinalls.
‘She was incredibly charming, although very arrogant,’ he recalls. ‘She was very intense and love-bombed me. I was in love with her, but it was a strange kind of love.
‘I was in a vulnerable place. My grandmother, who raised me, had recently died and a previous engagement had ended. I had a lot of mental health problems and it wasn’t a healthy relationship.’
What did she tell him about herself?
‘She said she was born outside of Moscow. She even said she was related to the tsar. Her father was a mining engineer and she said she had lived in Azerbaijan and made money selling clothes.’
Like Bridget, Mitch had no reason to doubt her claims given the wealth she flaunted; trips around town in Rolls-Royces and Bentleys and dinners with sheikhs in Dubai.
‘The next thing I knew,’ he says, ‘the police had come to our apartment and taken her away.’
The pair signed a separation agreement in 2010, separated formally in 2016 and finally divorced in 2019.
Mitch, who now lives in small property in Brighton, East Sussex, says: ‘My life is very different now and I’m happy now that she isn’t in it.’
Back, then, to Monaco, where not even the early summer sunshine and fragrant mandarin trees outside her home were able to put a smile on Barrett’s face last week.
Approached by the Mail about Bridget’s story, she insisted: ‘It’s all lies. Look at her and look at me. We are different people, you can tell. When I met her I already had three Rolls-Royce and three apartments in Mayfair. My family have lots of property in Monaco. I would not need her money. It’s an injustice what has happened to me.’
Barrett said she had only agreed to the settlement agreement ‘because I was under the pressure of my lawyers and their advice to avoid going to court. That is the only reason.’
She also denied being convicted in Austria — despite evidence seen by the Mail — and said she had spent only 24 hours in custody before being released.
‘I was the victim of a scam,’ she said.
Crucially, she appears determined to disobey the order to pay Bridget that was handed down by Richard Davison, Master of the King’s Bench Division at the High Court, last year.
‘I’m not going to pay her back,’ said Barrett. ‘It’s the principle of it. I’m not guilty.’
Neighbours say she rarely leaves her three-bedroom interior designed apartment, just a stone’s throw from the iconic Monte Carlo Casino and the Hotel de Paris — aside from daily trips out to walk her beloved dogs.
The apartment was put up for sale by estate agent Savills in January, along with a selection of online photographs revealing its art-filled rooms — but has since, apparently, been taken off the market.
For the time being then, there is still no sign of Barrett giving up her life of splendour in one of the most expensive neighbourhoods in the world.
Or, more pertinently, paying what she owes to the friend who once trusted her, a debt accruing interest at a rate of £179.87 a day.