The house in Greenwich went into Gloria Vance’s name on the eleventh of August 2011 and I signed something that day and I could not have told you what it was.

I want to do this part properly because it is the single most ordinary thing in this account and because a very large number of families have done exactly the same thing and have no idea what it means.

In 2011 Vance Global was four years old and growing and Julian was personally guaranteeing things.

His accountant — not a bad man, and not implicated in anything — raised, as accountants do, the question of asset protection: if the business went under and creditors came, the family home was exposed.

So the house was conveyed to his mother for one dollar and other valuable consideration, which is the standard language and which means, in this instance, one dollar.