Dead PC tycoon's estate eaten up by credit card debts

Disgraced PC-tycoon Charles Forsyth died almost penniless, according to the administrator of his estate. High-living Forsyth, who left a legacy of four crashed computer companies and served a three and a half year prison sentence, died last year of a heart attack aged just 49.

The public-school educated Forsyth, who was heir to the title of one of Scotland’s most famous clans and grew up in a castle, had been living in North London and working – without much success - as a car salesman when he died suddenly.

“It was not a very big estate," said John Kynnersley of FBC Manby Bowdler, who acted as Forsyth’s administrators. “Most of it was eaten up by credit card debts.”

Forsyth – who had remarried and been using the name Peytchev-Forsyth since his release from prison in 2006 – had been jailed for his part in the collapse of Personal Computer Science (PCS) which crashed in 1999. In 2001 Forsyth fled the UK, eventually being extradited from Australia to serve his sentence.

Forsyth had left a trail of destruction through the PC industry of the late 1980s and 1990s, with the collapse of a string of companies – an Edinburgh Apricot Computerworld franchise, PC makers Northern Technology Systems (NTS), East Lothian-based PC vendor Multiplex, which collapsed in the mid-1990s and finally Yorkshire-based PC-builder Personal Computer Science (PCS), which imploded in 1999. He used the companies as ‘cash cows’ to fund a high-rolling lifestyle that included a string of classic cars and a yacht.

Had Forsyth lived he would have inherited the title Baron Ethie, and feudal rights to a large estate in Scotland, which will now pass to his brother. Charles Forsyth was married twice, and had three sons by his first marriage. ®