The Duke of York has been dogged by questions about two overlapping problems – his judgement and his finances.
It is an issue that goes back to the loss of Prince Andrew’s status as a working royal, stepping down over his association with the financier and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
It has been raised again with the controversy over a Chinese business contact, accused of cultivating financial links with the prince in a way that could be exploited for “leverage for political purposes”. Buckingham Palace declined to comment, saying only that they do not act for the prince, who is not a working royal.
It is a reminder of how the royals can be targeted by those wanting to build links either for their own personal ambition or for a strategic political agenda. Getting close to the royals is seen as a way of getting influence.
For Prince Andrew there’s been a long-running stream of questions about his financial dealings.
In recent months there has been scrutiny over how he will pay for his 30-room mansion in Windsor, Royal Lodge.
The King is no longer funding him and the security bill alone is believed to be several million pounds per year. The prince receives no public funding from the Sovereign Grant, so it has raised the question of where he gets his income and how he can afford to fend off the so-called “Siege of Royal Lodge”.
It is not known how much he might have inherited from his mother or other family members.
It is also unknown how much private money he might have accumulated in his globetrotting days as government trade envoy between 2001 and 2011, when he had many wealthy international contacts.
In 2009 alone he carried out 550 engagements involved with this unpaid trade role. In 2010-11 it brought him on trips to 15 countries. When the prince stepped down from the role, then-Prime Minister David Cameron thanked him for the “major contribution he has made over the last decade to UK trade”.
His Pitch at the Palace business competition also saw him moving in entrepreneurial circles.
But there have been glimpses of his financial arrangements, sometimes in the reflected light of other stories.
Prince Andrew was repeatedly named in a court dispute between a Turkish millionaire and her former business adviser in 2022. There were no suggestions of wrongdoing by the prince, but the court case highlighted the prince as receiving payments in a complex set of financial deals. A gift of £750,000 was returned to the Turkish millionaire by the prince.
There are also signs from Companies House of his wider financial dealings, like companies where the name “Andrew Inverness” has been used. One of his titles is the Earl of Inverness.
Even before his public fall from grace, MPs had raised questions about the sale of his former home Sunninghill Park in 2007 to a son-in-law of a former Kazakh president, with suggestions the £15m paid to Prince Andrew had been £3m more than the asking price.
Concerns were also raised by MPs about the prince’s links to the son-in-law of a deposed Tunisian president.
There have also been reports of the prince receiving help with paying off loans.
Prince Andrew’s outgoings are also uncertain. Despite many claims of specific figures, it has never been disclosed how much he paid in the settlement with Virginia Giuffre or how he might have funded that case, in which he denied any wrongdoing.
There has been speculation about the running costs of Royal Lodge. But he paid millions upfront when he took on the 75-year lease in 2003, lowering the long-term cost of payments to the landlord, the Crown Estate.
The withdrawal of the King’s funding for Royal Lodge paints a picture of an isolated figure. As Prince Andrew is no longer a working royal, Buckingham Palace is not answerable for what he does or how he conducts his business. He operates outside the royal fold.
But the letter found in the possession of the unnamed Chinese business contact suggests the risks of such a position, as it described the prince as being: “In a desperate situation and will grab onto anything.”
