A man says he was left broke by his wife after she gambled away £3,500,000 and he only found out after their marriage had already ended. Christopher Forte said he was ‘smitten’ with wife Julia Postmen as soon as he met her working for an IT firm in 2010. Blinded by love, he says he never noticed her gambling debt – or that £169,000 of his and his parents’ money had gone – until after their split. She also told him she owed two businessmen £2.5million and a spread betting company hundreds of thousands more – as well as racking up credit card debts. Mr Forte, 36, married Posman in a £20,000 civil ceremony at the Grosvenor Hotel in 2014. Juliana Posman moved to England when she was 20, initially working at the Grosvenor Hotel in London, where she befriended businessmen Isaac Kaye and Warren Roiter. She told Mr Forte she earned money gambling on movements in the German stock exchange index the DAX, typically betting that it would fall below a certain level. She regularly reported daily wins of £500 on spread betting websites, with occasional losses of around £200. But on one occasion, Mr Forte said, she lost £1.3million in a day. They had a second wedding for her Chinese-Indonesian relatives in Indonesia a few months later, before a paradise honeymoon in Bali. But he says it didn’t take long for cracks to appear in their marriage.
Mr Forte had gone from working as a well-paid software contractor to being an English language teacher in Brighton, while Miss Posman was earning £90,000 a year commission from a credit and law firm. But red flags started to appear when she would ask her husband and his parents for loans, saying she needed to show she had assets of £5million to get a visa. ‘In retrospect it was absolute rubbish,’ Mr Forte said. ‘I’m British, she was my wife, and we could have got her a legitimate visa for a couple of thousand. ‘But I didn’t realise that – I was in love. I would wake up and she’d be in tears, saying “I need another £15,000”. ‘She’d be crying as she asked me if I could raid my savings, sell my Premium Bonds, or ask my parents. ‘If I asked any questions she’d get more upset, say I didn’t trust her, and walk out saying “You don’t want me anymore”.’ He claims he lent her £45,000, while his retired parents handed their daughter-in-law £131,330.
‘Juliana would say it was sitting in her bank account,’ said the former public schoolboy. Then in April 2016 he says he received a letter from a man named Mr Roiter, who told him that he and his business partner Mr Kaye had lent Miss Posman £2.5million. They claimed they had been told Mr Forte would guarantee the loans, but he knew nothing about them. She was in Indonesia at the time but when she came home to their flat in Balham, south London, she came clean about her spending. It emerged that she had given £750,000 to her brother, £250,000 to her parents and lost several million spread betting. When the couple divorced last August at a family court hearing in Brighton, Miss Posman agreed to pay the £169,000 she still owed her ex-husband and his parents at a rate of £1,700 a month. But he claims she hasn’t paid him a penny – and has now been declared bankrupt.
Mr Forte is now lodging with a relative while his ex-wife lives in a seaside flat nearby in Hove, East Sussex. ‘Gambling addiction is one of the worst because of the damage it does families,’ he said. ‘She didn’t marry me for my money, but maybe she saw I was a soft touch. She doesn’t deserve a visa.’ Mr Kaye and Mr Roiter are believed to have written off the £2.5million she owes them but have not commented on the case.
