08:41
Amy Winehouse had reportedly squandered £10 million during her lifetime, which included £1 million on drugs in three years, a £500,000-hotel bill and £1,000-a-month on her kittens. The tragic singer who was 27 when she died, left an estate worth £4,257,580, which was reduced to £2,944,554 after debts and taxes were paid. Since the Rehab hitmaker did not leave a will, that money will, by default, be divided between her divorced parents Mitch and Janis. According to the Sunday Times Rich List, she was worth £10 million but a friend of her manager claimed that the singer may have been worth closer to £15 million. A friend connected to her management company said that she spent it all on drugs, on men, and on “friends” who said they needed her. “Before Amy died, money was being leeched off her left, right and centre,” the Daily Mail quoted the friend as saying. “It was like taking money off a baby when it came to Amy — she couldn’t stop giving it away. Mitch knew that most of it had probably been spent already,” the friend added. If Winehouse wanted to give £2,000 to a friend who had a hernia, for example, as she once did, she’d just ask her father to turn up with an envelope of cash. When she wanted to keep kittens, she would simply ask Mitch to take out some money from her trust to pay the enormous bills she ran up: according to him, she managed to spend more than £1,000-a-month on them. She would blow £20,000 in an afternoon at Selfridges on dresses, for instance, but in Winehouse’s world this counted as fairly small change. And her lifestyle, with a permanent retinue of bodyguards, was very expensive. The bodyguards cost £250-a-day each and she had up to half a dozen of them. An extraordinary ‘working’ holiday in St Lucia three years ago — which stretched to about a year and a half — cost her £2,000 a night during the five months of it she stayed in the luxury resort of Le Sport. The bill for spa treatments alone was £6,000. A record company source said he thought that hotel stay cost her at least £500,000, and she didn’t just spend money on herself. Her former husband Blake Fielder-Civil was apparently adept at milking her for money, asking for £150 “for a cab” whenever she called and said she wanted to see him. It is widely assumed she funded both their drug habits for years, too. Within three weeks of their marriage in 2007 she had a near-fatal overdose. Her heroin and cocaine habit in the days when she was using drugs, which she stopped around 2008, was in the nature of £1,000-a-day. It is assumed she might have spent £1 million or more on drugs alone between 2006 and 2008. Fielder-Civil, meanwhile, was given a £250,000 pay-off in their 2009 divorce.
