Karine Solloway, of Park Crescent Mews West in London, stands accused of conspiracy to rob in relation to an incident at the home of Robert McKendrick in Alderley Edge on October 6 last year. She denies the charge.

At around 10pm three men broke into the house while Mr McKendrick was in Africa on business, and tied up his wife, Priya McKendrick, and daughter Scarlett who was 17 at the time.

The women were bound with plastic cable ties, blindfolded with blacked out goggles, and had ear defenders placed over their ears.

They were threatened and dragged about the house during an ordeal which lasted for hours, prosecutor Andrew Ford told a trial at Chester Crown Court on Tuesday.

The three men eventually left with jewellery and other valuables worth an estimated £100,000.

Two men have since pleaded guilty to the robbery.

Kimpton Mativenga of Tanners Close, St Albans, is also charged with conspiracy to rob, on the basis that he was the third man at the house, but he denies the charge and appeared in the dock alongside Solloway on Tuesday.

In his opening statement Mr Ford told the court that Solloway and Mr McKenrick had had an affair that lasted for a ‘number of years’, and said Mr McKenrick had been ‘leading a double life’.

Mr McKenrick was said to have ‘business interests’ in Africa, including mining, logging and land farming, and it was said that his company African Land got into a ‘substantial financial dispute leading to extensive legal proceedings’.

Mr Ford said that while their affair was going on Solloway lent Mr McKenrick ‘huge sums of money’ to help with the legal costs, understood to run into the hundreds of thousands of pounds.

He said: “In 2013 the affair became public knowledge and Robert ended it. It was bitter. She says he promised her children, and said he would leave his wife for her.”

The prosecution alleges that Solloway became ‘obsessed’ with getting her money back from Mr McKenrick, and hired a man - referred to in court as the ‘ringleader’ - to rob his house.

He then hired Mativenga and the other man as ‘muscle’, it was said.

Mr Ford told the jury that Solloway and the ringleader exchanged a number of messages between September and November last year.

He was arrested on November 24, 2016, after some of the property stolen from the house was traced to an address in London. His DNA was then found on one of the ear defenders the robbers had left at the house.

Mr Ford said the guilty pleas from the two men ‘establish that there was an agreement in place to commit robbery and they admit their part in it. The defendants say they were not party to that agreement’.

“Karine Solloway was never meant to be present at the robbery, but the messaging shows she was backing it,” he said.

Mativenga was arrested on December 28, 2016, in St Albans.

The trial continues.