A Wall Street honcho says his ex-wife owes him $263,000 — that she billed him for no-show nannies.
Ten years after he settled a bitter custody battle accusing the Upper West Side mom of abusing their children, investment banker Henry F. Owsley III, a former Goldman Sachs executive who now runs the Gordian Group, also wants $2.5 million in punitive damages from former spouse Danica Cordell-Reeh.
Owsley, 59, claims Cordell-Reeh, 56, told him a “blatant lie” when she said she was spending his cash on salaries and related expenses for child-care providers.
“In fact those funds were not being used for their intended purposes at all,” the Princeton and MIT-educated dad huffs in Manhattan court papers.
Owsley says his now 17-year-old twins tattled that their nannies were absent during times Cordell-Reeh had billed her ex to pay for their services.
On one occasion the mom took the kids to her native New Orleans without a helper, where she accidentally poured a pot of boiling water on her son’s back, burning the child, his suit claims.
During their first court battle in 2002, Owsley temporarily had sole custody of the twins after telling the court that a nanny said his wife was starving her children and making them perform lewd sex acts on her.
State officials determined the charges were bogus and now the couple shares custody.
Cordell-Reeh had fired the nanny, Michelle Padilla, before Padilla reported her to the Administration for Children’s Services. Cordell-Reeh’s attorney at the time, Bernard Clair, discovered with the help of a private investigator that Padilla had made similar accusations against another parent and her own brother.
Cordell-Reeh referred calls to her attorney, Tom Shanahan, who declined to comment.
The former couple returned to divorce court in 2012 when Cordell-Reeh sued over child support.
That is when Owsley says he received documents allegedly proving that his former spouse wasn’t spending the money on their kids.
Cordell-Reeh has “continued to maintain her ‘honesty’ ” Owsley scoffs in court papers.
Their 2002 separation agreement gave Cordell-Reeh a sum of $40,000 a year in basic child support plus between $13,000 and $85,000 a year for a live-in nanny. The amount decreased as the children got older.
“At various points subsequent to the separation agreement, [Owsley] became suspicious that he was not obtaining the benefit of what he had bargained for,” the financial guru whines in his suit.
The duo are still in divorce court haggling over the payments.
Owsley’s Gordian Group specializes in distressed companies.