Business

Divorce olympics

Ambrosiadou’s Maltese Falcon, the world’s largest yacht (© Onne van der Wal/Corbis)

A nasty, “War of the Roses”-type divorce is rocking one of Europe’s oldest hedge funds — the onetime $3.4 billion Ikos family of funds founded by the now-battling husband-and-wife team whose privileged life of private jets, yachts and, recently, a possible 23-year-old Brazilian mistress has become the talk of London.

The battle has gotten so intense that the wife, Greek-born Elena Ambrosiadou, fired her husband’s team of 12 researchers while he was on vacation, according to court records. She then had police seize the keys to the company’s corporate jet while her pilot-hubby was at a Greek resort island, it was reported — leaving him stranded on the tarmac and forcing him to fly commercial back to his home in Monaco.

The mass firing alarmed clients of the funds so much they yanked their cash. As the couple’s office tensions rose, the fund’s assets tumbled to a low of $1.35 billion earlier this year.

The husband, Martin Coward, 52, who holds a Ph.D. in math and was the brains behind the Ikos funds’ quant trading operation — whose computer programs choose trades instead of having humans decide what to buy — was so upset at the slight that he recently ordered his own plane.

Coward, in addition to having a flair for math, also had an eye for young women, according to reports. It seems Ambrosiadou flew into a rage as Coward was publicly flaunting his affair on the Riviera with a 23-year-old blonde Brazilian beauty known only as Leiana, according to reports.

Ambrosiadou evened the playing-around field by buying one of the world’s largest private yachts for $120 million and coloring her dark Grecian locks a brassy blonde. She told an interviewer she bought the yacht from venture capitalist Tom Perkins to use a few weeks a year.

“I work 16 hours a day, seven days a week. I doubt if I’ll be spending much time on her,” she said.

The couple now appear to have his-and-her jets. While Coward is awaiting delivery of a new $2 million private plane, a Cessna Citation Mustang, Ambrosiadou has bought her own new nine-passenger jet.

Lawyers for both sides expect a rousing fight over the couple’s assets. Coward has left the company altogether to start his own shop, and Ambrosiadou now controls all of Ikos.

In recent weeks, she drummed up new investors to boost funds from a low this year of $1.35 billion to $1.95 billion to date. Returns have hit as high as 16 percent, her lawyer said.

Ambrosiadou, who once was Britain’s highest-paid female executive at $18 million a year, had been a chemical engineering student at Cambridge when she met the genius mathematician.

She joined BP to become its youngest-ever international executive at 27, while Coward joined Goldman Sachs to help set up its controversial quant trading system.

They launched Ikos (meaning “home”) in 1992 with $100,000. tharp@nypost.com