She transferred some of their Cypriot properties into her mother’s name, which the judge said he regarded as an “obvious attempt” to place assets beyond her husband’s reach.

The couple also owned a number of valuable items of jewellery, including investment grade diamonds and a Patek Phillipe watch, which were held in a Harrods Safe Deposit box to which Mr Tsvetkov held the keys

The High Court was told how Ms Khayrova persuaded Harrods staff that the keys had been lost and obtained a set for herself, failing to tell her husband she had done so and omitting the items from evidence.

Ms Khayrova also passed confidential information to Rustem Magdeev, her husband’s former business partner, during a separate legal case over a £15 million diamond bought at the Graff boutique in Cyprus.

Mr Tsvetkov – an entrepreneur who first came to the UK in 2004 and was granted a British passport and indefinite leave to remain five years later – has not been able to make “meaningful sums of money” since June 2022 as a result of his wife blocking him from the family bank accounts, the court was told.

But describing him as “clever, resourceful and well-connected with extremely wealthy friends”, Mr Justice Peel told the court that Mr Tsvetkov was optimistic that he would soon be able to begin trading again, probably in art.

Failed coffee business

The court was told that Ms Khayrova did not work during their marriage and that a coffee business she tried to set up during the divorce proceedings had failed.

“There is no real indication that her next business proposition, a private members’ beauty club, is likely to be financially fruitful,” added the judge.

At the beginning of the divorce case in 2021, Mr Tsvetkov accused his wife of taking his passport after he left the family home in Knightsbridge and refusing to give it back. She claimed he kept millions of pounds worth of paintings, jewellery and luxury cars.

Mr Justice Peel ultimately ruled that Ms Khayrova carries the “greater responsibility for this expensive litigation” and ordered her to pay half of her husband’s £1,761,488 legal bill.