England rugby legend is Lawrence Dallaglio is facing financial ruin after being hit with a fresh £500,000 bill.
The World Cup winner, 53, was declared bankrupt earlier this year after he and his wife of almost 20 years, Alice, also 53, divorced amid accusations of infidelity on both sides.
And new documents have revealed that he now owes £423,570 in overdrawn director’s loans for his failed sports company Lawrence Dallaglio Ltd.
Dallaglio, who spent all of his club career with Wasps, also owes more than £60,000 to liquidators – more than two years after they were appointed.
According to The Sun, Dallaglio and his wife sold their £2.7million home in Richmond, south west London, this May, after the ex-England captain agreed his share of the sale would go to paying off his loan debts.
Company documents filed last week reveal that his business owes around £350,000 to HMRC and £61,000 to two other creditors. The repayment of his director’s loan is expected to help pay the tax bill.
England legend Lawrence Dallaglio is facing financial ruin after being hit with a £500,000 bill
Dallaglio has been bankrupt after he and his long-term wife Alice divorced earlier this year
Dallaglio had hoped to pocket £3.3 million from the sale of the idyllic four-bedroom property in leafy Richmond, which had been his home for nearly 25 years after purchasing it at the height of his career.
But, as the Daily Mail revealed in June, he sold the house at a knockdown price – losing out on £600,000 – because of the desperate state of his financial affairs. It was snapped up by a young footballing star who plays in the Premier League.
While making a healthy profit on the sale of the property, which Dallaglio bought for £925,000 in 2001, it emerged during an insolvency court hearing earlier this month that the equity in the home was only around £1.2million.
The hearing was triggered by Dallaglio’s wife Alice, who was seeking an ‘urgent’ order allowing the immediate sale of the house. She was said to have done so in the hope of staving off the imminent threat of Dallaglio’s financial ruin.
Despite the sale going through, the bid failed and Dallaglio was declared bankrupt after one of his creditors secured the order.
It came two years after the sportsman, who now works as a TV pundit, narrowly avoided going bust following a petition by HMRC over an unpaid £700,000 tax bill.
During proceedings his financial woes were laid bare after it was revealed his sports business, which he set up the year he became England captain in 1997, owed cash to a string of creditors.
To prevent the firm being wound up by a court order, Dallaglio agreed to an ‘individual voluntary agreement’ to pay off his debts.
Dallaglio and his wife were together for around 20 years but both faced infidelity accusations
The rugby star and his wife, who he married in a romantic ceremony at Lake Como in 2005, sold their home just months after appearing at the Central Family Court in Holborn to finalise the end of their marriage.
When details of the divorce emerged, Alice’s family hit back at claims the marriage had never recovered from a fling the former model had with millionaire property developer Leon Butler in 2005.
The affair happened after the couple’s marriage reportedly hit a rocky patch following the birth of their children – son Enzo and daughters Ella and Josie.
Her artist mother Lydia Corbett – who was said to have been Pablo Picasso’s last muse – told how Dallaglio’s troubles were at the heart of the split.
She told the Daily Mail previously: ‘I’m very sad about it. People marry and they divorce, I’ve been divorced twice so I know what it’s like. It’s horrible, it’s painful for the heart and it’s not fair.
‘He did very well, I loved him, but he’s going through a bad phase and we hope he’s alright.’
Dallaglio, too, dropped the ball on a number of occasions.
Their marriage survived a succession of scandals dating back to the late 1990s when allegations of wild partying emerged, while Alice was at home looking after the children.
Dallaglio is a Wasps legend after spending his club rugby career with the Coventry-based side
Her affair came two years after the rugby ace allegedly slept with a married mother, leading to the woman divorcing her husband.
Four years earlier, Dallaglio was stripped of the England captaincy after he allegedly confessed he had used prostitutes in Amsterdam, and was accused of using and dealing cocaine and ecstasy.
He told an undercover newspaper reporter he had been a teenage drug dealer and reportedly added: ‘I made big, big money from dealing in drugs.
‘Why do you think I know so much about drugs? I was surrounded by it. I used to drive from one end of London to the other with five or six ounces of it (cocaine).
‘That’s how I used to make money before I took up rugby.’
Dallaglio also allegedly boasted how he and two other players had taken ecstasy ‘and then a couple of wraps of coke’ to celebrate winning the 1997 Lions series in South Africa.
At the time, Dallaglio claimed he had been ‘naive and foolish’ but admitted he had experimented with drugs in his late teens. He said he was now ‘completely against drugs’, adding: ‘I will always regret the effect that this has had on everyone.’
The incident led to him being fined £15,000 for bringing the game into disrepute on top of legal costs amounting to £10,000.
Dallaglio was stripped of the England captaincy after allegedly confessing he used prostitutes
In 2020 Dallaglio found himself caught up in another public ordeal when a court heard he made ‘payments of up to £10,000 at a brothel’ in Holborn, which also offered clients cocaine.
Wood Green Crown Court heard how undercover police raided a Georgian townhouse in July 2019 where a gang were running a vice operation supplying £300-an-hour prostitutes as well as Class A drugs.
Using evidence from card machines found in a secret compartment in a basement lavatory, prosecutors compiled a spreadsheet of payments made at the address. They included four from Dallaglio’s account in March 2019, amounting to a total of £10,500.
One of the transactions, for £7,550, was paid into the account of one of the defendants, a Romanian madam aged 22.
Dallaglio was interviewed under caution but was not arrested and did not give evidence in the case.
His scandals off the pitch seem at odds with his powerhouse performances at the back of the scrum during a glittering career.
Dallaglio was part of the England side that won the 2003 World Cup and earned 85 caps for his country. He was also picked for the British and Irish Lions on three separate tours during a glittering career.
He has also told how he was inspired to make something of his life following the tragic death of his older sister Francesca in the Marchioness riverboat disaster in 1989.
Dallaglio was part of the England side that won the 2003 World Cup and earned 85 caps
At 19, the trainee ballerina, who had performed for Princess Diana, was the youngest of the 51 victims who died after two boats collided on the River Thames in London. Dallaglio was 16 at the time and a boarder at Ampleforth public school in North Yorkshire.
The tragedy happened during the summer holidays and Dallaglio had also been invited to attend the party that night but declined because of a headache.
Dallaglio has told how the possession he valued above all others was a small wooden chest full of possessions that belonged to Francesca including ‘little treasures, like her diary, ballet shoes and jewellery’.
In an interview in 2011 Dallaglio said: ‘Losing a member of one’s family is a terrible thing, particularly for us, having been very close-knit. I became quite driven after that.
‘I thought: ‘I now actually need to pull my finger out and do something that’s going to bring everyone together.”
While rugby had just been a hobby up until then, Dallaglio – the son of an Italian father and an English-born mother of Irish descent – had already enjoyed a colourful childhood.
Before Ampleforth, Dallaglio attended private King’s House School in Richmond where, as a 12-year-old chorister, he sang at Andrew Lloyd Webber’s wedding and provided backing vocals for Tina Turner’s 1985 smash hit We Don’t Need Another Hero.
He also backed performances by Barry Manilow and appeared onstage in the West End in the Lloyd Webber musical Evita.
After retiring from the game in 2008, Dallaglio has worked as an after-dinner speaker alongside his TV and radio punditry. He set up his own charity, Dallaglio RugbyWorks, following the death of his mother Eileen from cancer in 2008.
He was awarded an OBE that same year, having already been given an MBE.
