‘Hard up’ Andrew may turn to family and friends
to help pay settlement
Analysis: estimates of up to £14m deal have prompted
calls for source of funds to be made public
Jamie
Grierson
@JamieGrierson
Wed 16 Feb
2022 19.49 GMT
The size of
Prince Andrew’s settlement with Virginia Giuffre may be undisclosed but lawyers
say it is certain to run into the millions, with estimates ranging from £5m to
£14m.
Such
eye-watering figures have prompted calls for the source of the funds to be made
public amid suggestions that the Queen will have to bail out her son.
Andrew is
known to be trying to sell his £17m ski chalet in Verbier, Switzerland, but it
is understood to be heavily mortgaged and the net proceeds are unlikely to cover
the cost of the settlement.
Andrew’s
only publicly known regular income was a £249,000-a-year allowance from the
Queen to fund his Buckingham Palace office while undertaking royal duties. He
would also have a small pension from his time serving with the Royal Navy, a
job he left in 2001.
Now, with
no royal duties to perform, it is not known what, if anything, he receives from
his mother.
Sunninghill
Park, Andrew’s former marital home in Windsor, was bought in 2007 by Timor
Kulibayev, the son-in-law of the president of Kazakhstan, for £15m – £3m more
than the asking price. Since 2004, Andrew and his ex-wife, Sarah Ferguson, have
lived together at Royal Lodge, a Grade II-listed house in Windsor Great Park
that is a former residence of the Queen Mother.
A
spokesperson for Kulibayev said it was a “commercial, arm’s length transaction”
using “entirely legitimate” funds.
David
McClure, the author of The Queen’s True Worth: Unravelling the public and
private finances of Queen Elizabeth II, said Andrew did not have sufficient
resources for the settlement and would have to turn to his mother for help,
though favours from wealthy friends should not be ruled out either.
“The very
fact he’s down to selling the chalet does indicate that he’s not mega wealthy.
He wouldn’t be selling it if he was mega wealthy,” McClure said. “[As for]
other sources of revenue – more than likely he’s got his own portfolio of
private shares. Given his lifestyle, given the financiers he mixes with, it
would be amazing if he didn’t have his own portfolio of shares.”
If the
Queen is pitching in to help her son, it would not be the first time: she
reportedly helped Prince Charles with his £17m divorce settlement with Diana,
Princess of Wales in 1997.
The Queen’s
main source of funding is revenue from her semi-private estate, the Duchy of
Lancaster, which brought her £23m last year and about £20m annually in previous
years. “It is her cash cow,” McClure said. “She uses it for private income,
she’s 95, so I don’t think she’s short of a bob or two.”
He said
this would be a good use of the money “to stop all the reputational damage that
the Giuffre case threatened to bring if it had gone to court in the US. Of
course it’s a bad case insofar that somewhere along the line the Queen might
have to fork out X million, but that’s far better than having all the
reputational damage that could come from a year-long drib and drab of damaging
information about the royal family, and specifically about Andrew.”
Stephen
Bates, the author of Royalty Inc: Britain’s Best Known Brand, said: “He doesn’t
have huge resources, he’s pretty dependent on his mum … if the sum is £10m to
£12m there won’t be enough to meet it. Because he was perennially hard up, he
certainly doesn’t have the money to pay it out of his bank account.
“One of the
reason he was hanging around unsavoury characters like [Jeffrey] Epstein and
[Ghislaine] Maxwell was because he’s always been attracted to the lifestyle of
people wealthier than he is. That was obviously his downfall in this case.”
Bates said
it was unlikely Andrew could turn to his ex-wife for help. “Sarah has been
perennially short of money, which is why she’s got into all sorts of scrapes,
so she’s not in a position, even if she wanted to, to find that sort of money,”
he said. “But they do have rich friends. The question is how salubrious some of
those friends are.”
Another
royal expert said it was likely the public would never know what contribution,
if any, came from the Queen.
Joe Little,
the managing editor of Majesty magazine, said: “If we are clear that it is
coming from a private source, albeit the Queen, then it’s no burden to the
taxpayer. I think perhaps that needs to be underlined.
“The
figures are pretty transparent nowadays. The Queen has a private income which
she uses to support various members of her family, so if that’s the case then
so be it. Who else is going to support him other than the Queen?”
Wherever
the cash comes from, McClure was adamant the source and value should be made
public. “There’s so much public interest round the world, it’s a major story,
Andrew is a public figure – you may argue as of last month he’s been stripped
of his titles, but he’s still linked to the palace.
“It’s
totally legitimate that the palace and its lawyers or the American lawyers give
some indication as to the size of the cash settlement.”
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