Prince Andrew’s finances: my four-year quest to uncover the truth

This month, it also emerged that in November 2022 Andrew set up a new company, Innovate Global, fronted by his long-term accountant, Arthur Lancaster, as the sole officer. Innovate describes itself as providing “a network of investor and business resources to accelerate the growth of emerging start-ups and tech hub cities internationally”.

These revelations raised fresh questions over whether the duke is using the contacts he built up through his time as the taxpayer-supported special representative for trade between 2001 and 2011, and with Pitch@Palace, to further his own business interests.

This is but the tip of the iceberg of the York family business activities, because the whole family works together: not just Andrew and Sarah, Duchess of York, his ex-wife, but also their daughters Princess Beatrice, 36, and Princess Eugenie, 34.

Both daughters have long been involved in supporting their father’s financial schemes. In November last year, for example, one of Andrew’s business deals in Japan involved a public appearance from Eugenie at a Tokyo event run by Innovate for 1,000 Japanese businessmen. This involvement with their father goes back much further: Andrew often took his daughters on special representative trips and had them join Pitch@Palace events.

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Andrew’s finances are a longstanding issue and there has often been speculation about how he could afford to live in the 32-room Royal Lodge, to buy a Swiss chalet for £18 million and to acquire a collection of luxury watches, including several Rolexes, pieces from Cartier, and a Patek Philippe watch worth almost £150,000. He is also known to have a love for expensive cars, including a £220,000 Bentley and a succession of Range Rovers.

Though Andrew has inherited substantial monies through royal family trusts, in his youth he was always kept on a tight financial rein. While boarding at Gordonstoun he was reported to have envied the wealth of fellow pupils, such as the children of Stavros Niarchos and Sean Connery.

During his 20-year career in the Royal Navy, he had few opportunities to make money but that all changed after Tony Blair appointed him as special representative on leaving the service in 2001. It was an appointment that his elder brother Charles counselled against and even at the time politicians raised concerns that Andrew might abuse his public position for private gain.

Shortly after his appointment, the duke met the billionaire David Rowland, who was developing his Luxembourg-based private bank, Banque Havilland, aimed at rich clients who might not easily find banking facilities, and a business partnership was forged.

Rowland — nicknamed “Spotty” because of his acne — is the son of a scrap metal merchant who left his comprehensive school in south London without sitting a single O-level. After a series of audacious takeovers of rival firms he had made his first millions by the age of 23. By 2019, according to The Sunday Times Rich List, he was worth £650 million.

Rowland was once described as a “shady financier” on the floor of the House of Commons and in 2010 his attempt to become Conservative Party treasurer foundered after press revelations about his business dealings.

The Rowlands and Andrew regularly attended each other’s parties and were guests at each other’s houses. David Rowland stayed at Balmoral and had tea with Queen Elizabeth and Prince Charles in the summer of 2010.

Four months later, he paid off £40,000 of the £85,000 Sarah owed her PR spokeswoman Kate Waddington. In 2018, he was a front-row guest at Eugenie’s wedding.

Andrew has had a private bank account at Banque Havilland since 2015 and in the months after opening that account he borrowed £125,000 on average each month, a loan that was extended ten times before he requested a further £250,000 for “general working capital and living expenses” in November 2017.

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That year, Banque Havilland made an unsecured loan of £1.5 million to the duke at 8 per cent interest, which, according to documents disclosed to Bloomberg News, was “not in line with the bank’s risk appetite”, but was approved because it could lead to “further business potential with the royal family”. In March 2018 it was repaid early using £1,503,000 transferred to Andrew from a Guernsey-registered company, Albany Reserves Ltd. The company is controlled by the Rowland family.

Though ostensibly promoting British trade and investment during his time as special representative, the duke often simultaneously conducted his own business activities on these official trips, which often involves taking commission for acting as a middleman and making introductions for deals.

On occasion Andrew would bring David Rowland and his son Jonathan along on these trips, as well as Epstein, who in 2011 famously paid £15,000 towards the Duchess of York’s debts.

Rather than stay in the British residence while travelling, Andrew often preferred to stay in five-star hotels away from the prying eyes of embassy staff. During one trip to Thailand in June 2006, the duke was invited but declined to stay at the British residence, instead checking in to the luxurious Grand Hyatt Erawan hotel.

Until March 2019, Andrew, one of whose courtesy titles is Earl of Inverness, had a 40 per cent stake in a firm based in the British Virgin Islands called Inverness Asset Management, which was ultimately owned by Rowland’s Blackfish Capital Management. His name on the relevant documentation is Andrew Inverness.

Andrew has long operated through such names, offshore and nominee accounts (a financial arrangement where a third party holds assets on behalf of the actual owner) and a succession of companies not required to provide full accounts, making it difficult to examine his business activities.

He also uses frontmen such as Arthur Lancaster, who has been accused by HMRC of “aggressively promoting tax avoidance schemes in the UK for years”.

Another frontman is Dominic Hampshire, a former Scots Guards Officer and equerry to the Duke of Kent who fronted another Andrew company, Lincelles, as well as acting as the point man with Yang Tengbo for the duke’s activities in China.

Researching Andrew is a remarkably difficult process. There should be thousands of publicly available files relating to his time as special representative for the decade up to 2011. From these one might learn who accompanied him on his foreign jaunts.

Yet the Department for Business and Trade claims to have nothing on record before 2008 and the Foreign Office, deploying every exception possible, has failed — in spite of scores of FoI requests made by me over four years — to produce anything beyond a few pages of what could have appeared in the Court Circular, such as guests at a local cocktail party or travel arrangements to visit a school.

Responses to my inquiries usually state that the request is “too broad” and it is then refused on a cost compliance basis; or that it is “too narrow” and they have no material, relying on semantics of whether one referred, for example, to telegrams or emails. If more than three similar requests are made — and anything related to Andrew’s time as special representative is counted as similar — within three months they are aggregated and refused.

It is clear that obstructions have been placed in front of Andrew. One has to ask why.

These difficulties have been compounded by the additional protections afforded to the royal family, even though Andrew’s time as special representative was as a taxpayer-funded public servant and Buckingham Palace now claim he is no longer a royal. The royal family is largely exempt from the Freedom of Information Act; there is a convention that parliamentary questions are not asked about the family. Wills, even those of the most minor members, are closed, making it difficult to trace the transfer of wealth.

There was controversy after Prince Philip died when the application to ensure his will was closed for 90 years was held in a secret hearing, amid suspicion that the initially penniless prince died a very rich man. We do not know what was in Queen Elizabeth’s will, including what she left her son Andrew.

There were calls 20 years ago in parliament for a royal register that would register all royal business interests and investments, but it came to nothing. In any case, such a register is only as good as the information provided.

From my experience, the mixture of non-disclosure agreements that Andrew has insisted on for staff and business partners, and deference towards the royals, mean few people will discuss their dealings with him. This protection has allowed Andrew to operate with limited scrutiny for decades.

The details that do emerge tend to come from legal documents, as in the recent Yang national security case. Another example is a High Court case from 2022 in which a Turkish millionaire, Nebahat Isbilen, sued her former adviser Selman Turk. This case revealed a series of payments to the York family made by a company named Alphabet Capital, which for a long time was listed in Companies House filings as a dormant company with no staff.

This included £750,000 paid into Andrew’s personal bank account at Coutts in 2019, on the grounds that Andrew had helped to obtain a Turkish passport for Isbilen. It was paid nine days after Turk won an award at Pitch@Palace for his “digital bank”, called Heyman AI. After the story broke about the payment, the sum was repaid.

Sarah received at least £225,000 from the Alphabet account, many of the payments being made under the reference “PEG001”. Her representatives claimed these payments were for work she did as “brand ambassador” for Pegasus Group Holdings, an American green energy company. Court documents indicated that the funds came from Alphabet Capital Ltd.

A further payment of £10,000 was made by Alphabet Capital Ltd, which the court heard was a “fraudulent” entity used for money laundering, to Eugenie, under the payment reference “TK008”. Eugenie claimed not to know Turk or Isbilen and the money was from “a longstanding family friend to assist with the cost of a surprise party for my mother”. The next day a further payment of £15,066.05 was made to Eugenie under the payment reference “Birthday Gift” — some five months before her birthday.

Another case that reached the courts in 2020 was that of Gate Ventures, a theatre and film investment company, after Chinese investors queried where their £24 million investment in the company had gone. Documents in this case revealed that the Duchess of York received £72,000 a year as a non-executive director of Gate Ventures.

On top of these fees, she was paid £200,000 for “marketing and promotion” from an offshore bank in St Vincent and the Grenadines and received a £90,000 “loan”, which was paid back, to help one of her fledgling companies. Neither she nor Gate Ventures’ former chairman Johnny Hon have explained these payments. Hon also paid Zara Tindall £100,000 a year as a non-executive director of a company he owned.

None of this looks good, particularly at a time when the monarchy has been subject to much negative publicity, especially about their wealth. But it may help to solve the mystery of how Andrew is able to remain at Royal Lodge.

The King may be concerned by the optics of a non-working and discredited member of his family continuing to live in such magnificence — he is keen to move Andrew to the smaller Frogmore Cottage — but there is little he can do as long as his younger brother follows the terms of his lease for Royal Lodge. Andrew was granted this lease by the Crown Estates in 2003 after the death of the Queen Mother, who lived in the lodge. This too was controversial, because it was not offered on the open market.

The public narrative about Andrew is that the former Falklands hero now spends a lonely life trapped in Royal Lodge, going for horse rides in Windsor Great Park and playing video games and golf. But the reality is rather different. According to one source, he has continued his business activities with recent trips to the Middle East and Switzerland.

The King can only hope there are no further scandals to emerge and the press and public soon lose interest in his brother. On present evidence, that is very unlikely.

Entitled: The Controversial Lives of the Duke and Duchess of York, by Andrew Lownie, is published later this year.