It can, it seems, happen to anyone. If the fear of repossession is something that is supposed to afflict only the lower-paid and the sub-prime, then the news that it has happened with an £11.6million London mansion will make those at the bottom end of the market smile a little and those at the top end blanch.

The six-bedroom house on Ilchester Place in the wealthy enclave of Holland Park has been repossessed and put on the market at £10 million. The property was owned by Robert Bonnier, 38, who shot to fame in the dot-com boom a decade ago with Scoot.com.

The company was valued at more than £3 billion and his stake briefly was worth £130 million before Scoot imploded, its demise hastened by an alleged dirty-tricks campaign.

In 2004, the Financial Services Authority fined Mr Bonnier a then-record £290,000 for misleading the stock market 12 times in the space of a seven-week period over his interest in Regus, the office services group. In 2006 a plan to make a stock market comeback was abandoned when he abruptly quit the AIM-listed Future Internet Technologies.

Last year the derivatives dealer Global Trader Europe brought a High Court case against him for an outstanding debt, by which time Mr Bonnier had turned his speculative eye to property. He bought and renovated a Holland Park house, selling it for £13 million, before buying the house on Ilchester Place last year for £11.678 million, with a view to selling it on for £15 million.

The Ilchester Place house was bought through Cristal Holdings, Mr Bonnier's Jersey-based company, with £4 million cash and mortgages on the balance. The £11.678 million purchase price was the highest among a number of sealed bids offered for the property at auction.

Industry-watchers fear that this high-end repossession could be the first of several, if not many. Tim Blenkin, the Mayfair-based estate agent, said: “There are five potential repossessions in Mayfair this year, which is unheard of.”

Mortgage lenders issued 39,078 claims for repossession from June to August this year, 17 per cent more than the same period last year, according to Ministry of Justice figures.

Not all repossession claims are successful and not all successful ones result in borrowers losing their homes.

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