Prince Harry’s North Pole guide in court battle with billionaire over tragic Titan trip

A British explorer who guided Prince Harry to the North Pole is locked in a £1m court fight with a billionaire heiress over a cancelled expedition to the wreck of The Titanic on the ill-fated Titan submersible.

Henry Cookson, a former safari guide and polar explorer, now runs Cookson’s Adventures, an ultra-luxury adventure travel company specialising in bespoke trips for high net-worth individuals to far flung and otherwise inaccessible spots, often costing millions.

In 2017, his company was paid £680,000 by Karen Lo, the super-rich heiress to a Hong Kong soy milk fortune, to organise a once-in-a-lifetime submarine visit to the Titanic, planned for 2018 aboard the OceanGate Titan craft.

But the 2018 dive was canceled after the vessel was damaged by lightning, with Ms Lo being offered a priority place on a future trip instead.

However she never got her trip after Covid intervened and the Titan vessel then infamously imploded during a dive to the wreck in June 2023, killing all five passengers, including OceanGate founder Stockton Rush, and causing the company’s operations to cease.

Ms Lo is now suing Holland Park-based Henry Cookson Adventures Ltd, claiming the company is responsible for refunding her for the Titanic trip she paid for but never took.

But Mr Cookson’s company is fighting the claim, saying the heiress knew there were no refunds when she put her money down for the Titanic trip, and that she had a chance to go on the expedition later but never did.

Ms Lo is a Hong Kong based heiress with a reported net worth of $1 billion. Her wealth comes from Vitasoy, a soymilk and drinks company founded by her grandfather Dr Lo Kwee-seong, which has a reported global turnover of $1 billion and over 7,000 employees.

She hit the headlines in 2018 when she bought Sting’s New York apartment for $50m and again in 2023 when she sued a gallery owner for £500,000 over alleged non-delivery of a Banksy painting she had bought.

On his company’s website, Mr Cookson describes how he used his experience guiding horseback safaris in Kenya and in polar exploration, including a mission to the Pole with Prince Harry and the Walking With The Wounded charity, to set up ultra high-end adventure travel company Cookson’s Adventures.

“It’s these expeditions that served as inspiration in founding Cookson Adventures, bringing the same standards of ground-breaking excellence to the world of private travel. That’s whether working with remote tribes in Africa or organising Alaska’s most complex charter operations,” the website states.

Papers lodged with London’s High court describe how Mr Cookson had previously been “on friendly personal terms” with Ms Lo, even attending her wedding, and had organised trips worth “tens of millions of US dollars” for her and her guests.

Her barrister Jack Harding states in court papers: “The defendant agreed to organise and supply a two-week expedition for the claimant and 17 others to visit the wreck of the Titanic between 30th June and 14th July 2018.

“The defendant’s supplier for the expedition was OceanGate, a company which, at the material time, specialised in the provision of crewed submersibles for tourism, research and exploration.”

Having paid around £670,000 up front for the trip in May 2018, an email was sent by Cookson Adventure to Ms Lo explaining that the mission had been cancelled because the Titan craft had been struck by lightning and its electronic systems damaged.

The contract “provided ‘clients’ with 100% credit toward 2019 Titanic dives or any other expedition offered by OceanGate” due to the cancellation, but “OceanGate did not carry out any further dives to the Titanic wreck in 2019 or 2020,” he said.

“The claimant, through her agents and legal representatives, subsequently requested repayment of the sums paid under the contract. The defendant has refused to refund any of the claimant’s money.”

Ms Lo is suing under the Package Travel Regulations 1992, arguing it was an express or implied term of the contract that the dive would take place within a “reasonable time.”

“In repudiatory breach of the aforementioned express and/or implied terms, the Titanic Expedition did not take place in 2018 or at all,” he says.

“As a result of the defendant’s breach of contract, the claimant was entitled to and did elect to treat the contract as at an end.

“As a result of the matters set out above, the claimant seeks damages for her wasted expenditure in entering into a contract which was never performed.

“The defendant was enriched, at the expense of the claimant, by the payment and receipt of her money. It is irrelevant that the defendant may have subsequently passed some or all of the money to its own supplier.

“The claimant did not receive any benefit from the money that she paid to the claimant and/or the defendant did not provide any service of benefit to the claimant.”

Ms Lo’s lawyer says she wants her £670,000 back, plus interest at 8% from May 2018, taking the total claimed over £1m.

However in the defence to the action, Henk Soede, for Mr Cookson’s company, denies they owe the heiress a penny.

“She was introduced to Mr Cookson through a personal friend in 2011-12 and has been using the defendant’s services since then, in every case for exclusive unique and tailor-made trips at very high cost,” he says.

“For example, in 2018/19, after the postponed dive voyage to which this claim relates, the defendant arranged and the claimant paid in full for a multi-million dollar trip to the Antarctic on three yachts, including the super-yacht purchased in the name of the claimant the year previously, with twin helicopters and two submersibles, for a total of 13 guests and four nannies.

“The claimant’s annual budget with the defendant ran into tens of missions of US dollars.

“The claimant and Mr Cookson were on friendly personal terms and Mr Cookson had attended her wedding in Rome and accompanied a number of her friends who traveled with the couple to Egypt as part of their honeymoon.

“At no stage did the defendant agree to ‘organise and supply’ an expedition for the claimant and her guests to visit the wreck of The Titanic,” the lawyer states, insisting that Mr Cookson’s company instead had an “affiliate agreement” to be a booking agent for some of the planned trips, with OceanGate remaining the “organiser”.

The contract had also contained a no-refund clause, with the agreement being that a credit towards a future voyage with priority booking rights be provided instead if the mission did not go ahead for technical reasons.

“The defendant disputes this claim because, in outline, the Package Travel Regulations 1992 do not apply because the holiday was neither sold nor offered to be sold in the UK,” he says.

“Alternatively, even if the regulations did apply, the claimant would not be entitled to a refund as the package was not cancelled but only postponed, in accordance with the agreed terms.

“Nor in any event would the defendant be liable to refund monies paid to it, which, as the claimant was well aware, had been passed on to the party providing the voyage, which was also, if the regulations applied, the organiser.

“The claimant did not take up the credit within a reasonable time and thereby waived or lost her entitlement. Further, by notifying the defendant that she did not intend on using the credit in the future, the claimant terminated the contract and/or cancelled the voyage.

“Alternatively, the contract was in any event frustrated as a result of the complete loss of the dive vessel in 2023 and the resulting cessation of the provider’s trading activities.”

The lawyer states that whilst no dives took place in 2019 and Covid restrictions stopped any missions in 2020, dives took place in 2021 and 2022 which Ms Lo could have joined using her credit, prior to the ill-fated final mission in 2023.

“At all material times, OceanGate acknowledged that the defendant was entitled to a credit for un-taken 2018 missions,” he says.

“However, the claimant made clear that she did not want to use her credit in 2019 or at any time in the future.”

Her solicitors had instead demanded a refund in June 2019, he said.

The case, unless settled, will come before a judge in court at a later date.

The Titan submersible was the first privately-owned submersible with a claimed maximum depth of 4,000 metres and the first completed crewed submersible with a hull constructed of titanium and carbon fiber composite materials.

After testing with dives to its maximum intended depth in 2018 and 2019, the original composite hull of Titan developed fatigue damage and was replaced by 2021.

In that year, OceanGate began transporting paying customers to the wreck of the Titanic, completing several dives to the wreck site in 2021 and 2022.

During the submersible’s first 2023 expedition, it imploded during the crew’s descent to the wreckage of Titanic, about 320 nautical miles (590 km) south-southeast off the coast of Newfoundland.

The submersible was carrying tourists Hamish Harding, Shahzada Dawood, his son Suleman Dawood, crew member and Titanic expert Paul-Henri Nargeolet, and OceanGate founder and the vessel’s pilot, Stockton Rush.