As I’ve said before, I’m less interested in the ins and outs of Prince Andrew’s financial crimes, his alleged espionage and his alleged sharing of classified material. Given what we know about Andrew’s crimes against women and girls, it feels weird to see all of this focus on “Andrew shared classified documents.” That being said, the white collar crimes are connected to trafficking, abuse and the sex crimes because that’s the vital part of Andrew’s quid pro quo with Jeffrey Epstein. Andrew was passing along all of the classified info TO Jeffrey Epstein and Epstein’s associates, and in exchange, Epstein trafficked girls to Andrew. And ALL of this is connected to larger questions of “what did the institution/King Charles know and when.” Well, according to the Mail on Sunday’s cover story, Charles (then the Prince of Wales) was informed about a major part of Andrew’s criminal enterprise as early as 2019.
King Charles was warned as long ago as 2019 that the Royal Family’s name was being ‘abused’ by Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor’s business associations, The Mail on Sunday can reveal. In a bombshell email, a whistleblower told the Palace that the former Duke had secret financial links to controversial millionaire financier David Rowland, who was abusing his royal links.
Messages seen by this newspaper also appear to show that Andrew – who was sensationally arrested on Thursday over suspicions of misconduct in public office – allowed Mr Rowland to effectively join in with his official duties. The cache of emails threaten to draw Charles further into the crisis, triggered by Andrew’s links to Jeffrey Epstein, and allegations he passed potentially confidential and sensitive documents to the convicted paedophile.
Andrew once told Epstein that Mr Rowland was his ‘trusted money man’. The banker and his son Jonathan joined Andrew on trips he made in his official capacity as a taxpayer-funded trade envoy between 2001 and 2011, visiting places such as China and former Soviet states. Over a period of several years, Andrew repeatedly alerted Mr Rowland to business opportunities arising from his work. Mr Rowland once gave Andrew’s ex-wife Sarah Ferguson £40,000 to help clear debts and, in 2017, paid off a £1.5 million loan for Andrew.
In August 2019, a whistleblower who had detailed knowledge of Andrew’s business dealings with Mr Rowland sent an email to Charles, then Prince of Wales, via the royal lawyers Farrer & Co, warning of ‘David Rowland’s abuse of the Royal Family’. It said: ‘HRH the Duke of York’s actions suggest that his Royal Highness considers his relationship with David Rowland more important than that of his family.’
The whistleblower then sent a second email to Mr Rowland himself, copying in Clive Alderton, Charles’s private secretary, and Mark Bridges, the late Queen’s solicitor at Farrer & Co. That message said: ‘The evidence provided unequivocally proves that you have abused the Royal Family’s name.’ The email further alleged that Mr Rowland ‘paid HRH The Duke of York to procure a Luxembourg Banking Licence’ for his private bank, Banque Havilland, and included what were claimed to be Andrew’s bank account details.
You can see more information at the Mail. While some of this is new information to me (the whistleblower letters to Charles, the dealings with David Rowland), the broad strokes of “Andrew used his trade ambassador position to enrich himself and his sleazy friends” has been well-known this whole time. The problem is that few reporters really dug into it, because the other crimes were so heinous and because why look into it when Prince Harry married a Black American! Look again at the timing too – August 2019 was a moment of major upheaval for the Windsors. That whole month, there were hundreds of tabloid covers devoted to… the Duchess of Sussex’s Vogue guest-editorship. That was the height of the British media working in tandem with the Windsors to bully and abuse Meghan until she left the country. Not to mention, Jeffrey Epstein “died” in custody on August 10, 2019. Three months later, Andrew would give that horrible Newsnight interview, and Charles was the one telling QEII that Andrew had to step down as a working royal.
Anyway, there are definitely larger questions about what various senior royals knew and when, and that should be investigated as well. Not by the tabloids, not an internal CYA palace investigation, but a real police and parliamentary investigation alongside Britain’s security and intelligence services. But as soon as anyone starts saying “hey, the police need to interview the king about his brother’s crimes,” the whole thing will probably just go away.
Photos courtesy of Avlon Red, cover courtesy of the Mail.
