When the chips are down, everyone's a spiv

Robin Ellis, "London's poshest builder", has gone bust. It's no surprise - the man almost defined pre-crunch excess. All those basement swimming pools finally sank him. In the good times, Ellis's roster of celebrities, bankers and oligarchs - or "high net worths" as they are irritatingly referred to - made fine clients. They saw no ceiling, or more aptly in London, depth, to their schemes at home. No wonder the man was said not to get out of bed for less than £1million. He only did exotic refurbishments, incorporating underground squash courts, car parks with turntables and pools that turned into concert halls beneath the city streets (in the latter case, retractable seating for 100 guests unfolded from a wall).

But when the music stopped, those HNWs morphed into spivs. Ellis and his ilk, who have an exorbitant cost base of material and labour, wait for money from oligarchs' offshore companies, which have now evaporated. Celebrities call in lawyers on the flimsiest of excuses. And bankers and hedge-funders take one of a number of routes, none of which involves finding the money and paying up, as the rest of us would.

During the boom, something for nothing became a way of life for some of these people - you repackage some debt, you turn it into six currencies, you make a fortune. Money no longer seems real or necessary, a way of buying shoes or food. It's just something you don't pass on when your own supply stalls. So you either renegotiate downwards (my income's reduced, why shouldn't yours?); cancel and refuse to pay; or slow it down to a pace you feel comfortable with. For the builder, who pays suppliers when he's paid, that's the end of liquidity.

Stories of crunch crimes are increasingly common, as HNWs go from tax-dodging to avoiding paying altogether. One banker who lost money in Lehmans is locked in litigation over £250,000 costs with a world-famous architect when he called off her project. Another hedge-funder bawled out a decorator because a bulletin board and a handstiched carpet were late; he called her incompetent, a bully, and threatened to write to the papers. Who knows if he'll pay up?

"He will have been yelled at all day by his clients asking why they can't have their money back. It's kicking the dog," says a banker's wife. As Ellis discovered, a grand patron can quickly become a crunch monster.

* Catherine Ostler is editor of ES magazine.