Lampard accused of cruelty for evicting his children's great-gran from £200-a-week flat
By Louise Eccles for the Daily Mail
Published: 22:00 BST, 24 November 2012 | Updated: 01:55 BST, 26 November 2012
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Property empire: Lampard pictured with his ex Elen Rives. He has been accused of cruelty after serving his former partner's grandmother with an eviction notice
Frank Lampard was yesterday accused of behaving ‘unscrupulously' after serving an eviction notice on his children's 100-year-old great-grandmother.
The £150,000-a-week midfielder bought a four-bedroom flat for Teresa Canete to live in in 2008, when he was still engaged to her granddaughter, Spanish lingerie model Elen Rivas.
When the couple split shortly after, Mrs Canete continued to live in the £200-a-week home, in Barcelona.
But now the pensioner, who has a heart condition, has received a legal letter instructing her to leave the £290,000 property within two weeks after a prospective buyer was found.
Meanwhile, the millionaire Chelsea and England player lives in a newly-renovated £10million mansion with fiancée and television presenter Christine Bleakley. Yesterday, Miss Rivas's mother Elena said Lampard was just ‘trying to find another way of hurting' her daughter and that the eviction could kill her mother.
She said her mother had diabetes, a heart complaint and high blood pressure.
‘Her health is frail, like most 100-year-old people's would be,' she said. ‘I find it degrading and consider Frank to be acting totally unscrupulously.'
Rubbishing Lampard's argument that he had found a buyer, she said: ‘He'd lose money on the flat because property prices in Spain have plummeted. But even if he were to earn anything it would be small change for a man like him.
Notice to leave: Teresa Canete, right, has been told to leave her flat in this Barcelona block
‘He's a multi-millionaire Premiership footballer for God's sake. Why does he need the money?'
A family friend said: ‘Teresa thought the world of Frank. It's really tragic. It strikes me as a very cruel and unnecessary thing to do.'
A letter sent from Spanish law firm Olivella Abogados was delivered on November 15 to Mrs Canete, who helped to raise Miss Rivas when her parents separated.
It read: ‘Dear Madam, I am sending this present letter on behalf of my client Frank Lampard to inform you that he has the intention of recovering immediately the property he owns and which you currently occupy with no formal rights.
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‘For the aforementioned reasons he requires that at the end of 15 days, counting from the present day, 15 November 2012, you proceed to leave the dwelling.'
It comes just days after it emerged that Tory MP and former minister Peter Luff was using taxpayers' money to rent a £1,600-a-month West London flat from Lampard.
The flat is part of the footballer's £23million property portfolio, which includes a dozen properties.
The player said yesterday he had offered to sell the Barcelona property to Miss Rivas, with whom he has two daughters, for below-market value, but she had declined.
Renovated: Lampard and fiancee Christine Bleakley, pictured last year, live in a newly-renovated £10 million mansion
Lampard, 34, bought the third-floor flat for
avvocato previdenziale Mrs Canete to live in in 2008, but split with Miss Rivas later that year. Two years later, he put the flat on the market and a buyer has come forward. A spokesman for the star said: ‘Frank offered the flat to Elen at a price below market value and also offered to stand as her guarantor if she needed a mortgage.
‘Even though it's her relative who has been living there, and that Elen is looking to buy herself a flat in Barcelona, she has declined all offers to take over the property.
‘Frank and Elen have been apart for over four years now…It is time Elen took responsibility for her own family.'
It is not the first time their acrimonious relationship has been played out in public. Last December she accused Lampard and Dancing on Ice presenter Miss Bleakley, 33, of ‘trying to stop his children from speaking to their mother over Christmas'.
She posted furious messages on
Twitter in which she claimed that the couple had prevented her from talking to her daughters Luna, seven, and Isla, five, over the phone to wish them a happy Christmas.
Miss Rivas lives in a £2.85million townhouse overlooking the Thames at Chelsea, which Lampard bought for her and their daughters to live in when they split.
How player amassed £23m empire
Frank Lampard has amassed a property portfolio of a dozen homes together worth more than £23 million.
He lives in a newly renovated house in Chelsea worth an estimated £10 million, and also owns a flat nearby which was rented by MP Peter Luff.
In March, Lampard put Yaffingales, a six-bedroom Tudor-style mansion in Surrey, on the market for £7 million. He bought it for £4 million in 2004.
He has three apartments in London's Docklands together worth £1.1 million, and a three-bedroom lodge in Surrey worth £750,000. There is also a £165,000 terrace home in Stratford, East London, and a flat in neighbouring Leyton worth £187,000.
In West London, the star is
understood to be demolishing a vacant two-storey warehouse to build a four-storey home. Similar-size properties in the area sell for about £3 million.
Outside London, the player has invested in two modern properties in Cambridge, collectively worth more than £500,000.