Team Nigella's pounds 1.2 million bill on Charles Saatchi's card

Charles Saatchi paid annual credit card bills of pounds 1.2 million run up by his ex-wife Nigella Lawson and five aides for "personal spending" on his family, a court was told on Thursday.

He paid the bills in full by direct debit each month without scrutinising where the money was going, even though employees were sometimes spending more than pounds 5,000 on designer clothes in single transactions, it was disclosed.

One aide put the pounds 12,500 bill for her wedding reception on Mr Saatchi's credit card, the court heard. Others used the cards to pay for health spas, dental work and visits to the hairdresser.

Details of the extraordinary amounts of money spent by Miss Lawson and the couple's personal assistants were exposed at the trial of two Italian sisters accused of fraudulently spending at least pounds 685,000 on Mr Saatchi's credit cards.

Francesca and Elisabetta Grillo are alleged to have treated themselves to a four-year "free for all" of spending without being authorised to do so. They both deny fraud, and are expected to claim that Miss Lawson agreed the payments, partly in return for their silence over her alleged drug use.

Isleworth Crown Court, west London, heard that the sisters were two of five aides to Miss Lawson and Mr Saatchi who had credit cards linked to Mr Saatchi's personal account. Between them they averaged pounds 100,000 a month.

The court was told that Elisabetta, who allegedly defrauded the couple out of pounds 105,000 over a four-year period, spent less on the credit card than Anzelle Wasserman, another assistant who is not under suspicion.

Ms Wasserman put a payment for pounds 12,500 at the Saatchi Gallery Mess on the credit card, said to have been the bill for her wedding reception. Mr Saatchi's finance director, Rahul Gajjar, suggested that the payment may have been "gifted by Nigella, it could have been authorised".

Mr Gajjar told the court that Miss Lawson's spending on the credit cards averaged pounds 7,000 per month. Francesca, 35, averaged pounds 48,000 per month in the four months to June 2012, and her 41-year-old sister averaged pounds 28,000.

The sisters' monthly spending was in excess of their annual salaries, which was pounds 28,000 for Francesca and pounds 25,000 for Elisabetta. They also used Mr Saatchi's personal minicab account for 105 journeys between them in a single month.

Credit card statements showed that in June 2012 Francesca spent pounds 64,336.97 on the Coutts bank credit card issued by Mr Saatchi. She is said to have admitted to Mr Gajjar that pounds 33,893 of that was "unauthorised".

This included pounds 5,385 spent in one transaction at the clothes store Miu Miu, pounds 2,650 spent at Prada in one day and pounds 2,300 at Louis Vuitton.

Other large transactions included thousands of pounds on transatlantic air fares and stays at hotels in New York and the Ritz in Paris. Elisabetta is said to have spent pounds 4,850 without permission in the same month.

Asked whether the credit card bills were checked, Mr Gajjar said: "The credit cards went through Charles's personal account so they weren't analysed." He said the cards issued to Miss Lawson and the five personal assistants were for "personal spending for Nigella and the family".

Mr Saatchi became suspicious about the sisters' spending in June last year when he discovered one of them ordered a taxi on his account to go to a polo match in Berkshire.

Mr Gajjar suggested to Elisabetta, originally the couple's nanny, and Francesca, originally their housemaid, that they could continue living rent-free in a flat owned by Miss Lawson and pay back the money in monthly increments. But Elisabetta became "hysterical" and "said they were being treated worse than Filipino slaves". The trial continues.