A luxury watch salesman k!lled himself just hours after he was accused of ‘not putting up enough of a fight’ when the shop was robbed of £1.4 million worth of designer timepieces, a court heard today.
Salesman Oliver White, 27, was put in a chokehold and bound with cable ties while two men stole the ‘very high-value’, ‘uninsured’ watches – including a £30,000 Rolex Sky-Dweller – from 247 Kettles in Richmond, west London, on May 25 last year.
The following day he was summoned to an ‘intense’ meeting with the store’s owners – ‘his friends’ Conor Thornton and Joe Riley – and another investor where they implied that the ‘hard-working’ manager was ‘somehow involved’ in the heist.
Devastated Mr White was left feeling he had ‘somehow let others down’, and transferred the maximum £14,000 from his life savings to 247 Kettles shortly before taking his own life, the court heard.
Prosecuting Counsel Edward Brown told the jury: ‘The robbery meant that there was of course a huge loss and the watches were not insured; this was because of an earlier burglary in 2020. Insurance was, in practical terms, impossible – either actually not possible or the premium was so high as to be prohibitive.
‘It must have been a pretty intense meeting.
‘He [Oliver White] was to tell his girlfriend that during the meeting he had been accused by the other man of not putting up enough of a fight, something apparently the others, his friends, did not disagree with. This devastated him.
Earlier in the trial the jury were told that Junior Kunu, 29, from Mitcham, south London, and Mannix Pedro, 37, from Cobham, Surrey, were among at least five men who conspired to carry out the £1.4 million heist of designer watches that have never been recovered.
Three of the accused alleged accomplices fled the country shortly after the raid as police sought their arrest. They remain at large abroad.
In statements to police following the heist on May 25, Mr White told how the raiders had visited the store two days before on the pretext of viewing watches and they had made a second appointment on the day of the robbery.
He had prepared trays of watches for them to view, before they ‘lunged’ at him and started ‘grabbing watches’.
