Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor's 10-year role as UK trade envoy was opposed within the royal family. Photo / Getty Images
Reaching for a role beyond his birthright as the monarchy’s spare, Prince Andrew took on one of the British Government’s most outward-facing posts: trade envoy.
From 2001 to 2011, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, as he is now known, hopscotched the globe not as a royal but as an official representative for trade and investment, courting presidents, ministers and chief executives and cooking up deals that at times made his family cringe.
Mountbatten-Windsor, the younger brother of King Charles, has been arrested for alleged misconduct in that role, deepening the fall from public life precipitated by his ties to Jeffrey Epstein and accusations, oft-denied, that he had three sexual encounters with one of Epstein’s teenage trafficking victims.
British police have searched Mountbatten-Windsor’s homes for evidence of misconduct in public office, and politicians are weighing their own inquiry.
Liam Byrne, chairman of the Business and Trade Committee, said members of Parliament were taking allegations related to Andrew’s conduct “acutely seriously” and could begin examining his work as trade envoy as soon as Tuesday.
Byrne added that MPs were “not in the market for letting anything slip through the cracks”.
Separately, London’s Metropolitan Police, which is investigating local aspects of the trafficking allegations related to Epstein, said that it was contacting officers who may have been assigned to Mountbatten-Windsor’s protection detail to “consider carefully whether anything they saw or heard during that period of service may be relevant to our ongoing reviews”.
As the scrutiny continues and intensifies, it has drawn renewed public attention to the trade envoy role, which several members of the royal family regarded as ill-advised from the beginning.
Mountbatten-Windsor’s tenure in the post began after his career in the Royal Navy ended.
His appointment in 2001 was backed by the Tony Blair government, with vocal support from Peter Mandelson, then the secretary for trade and industry.
Mandelson, who was fired as British ambassador to the United States and recently resigned from the Labour Party over his own ties to Epstein, pushed for the prince to get the position over the objections of members of the royal family other senior advisers.
“Many were quite unenthusiastic about him taking on the trade envoy role,” said a former United Kingdom security official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive political issue.
“If it weren’t for Mandelson’s advocacy, it would never have happened.”
Mountbatten-Windsor had scant background in trade policy, and his suitability was questioned in political and royal circles - including by his brother, Charles.
Mountbatten-Windsor’s public image also posed challenges.
Long before the tabloids branded him “Airmiles Andy”, a nickname earned for his long-haul travel at taxpayer expense, he was known as “Randy Andy”, a reference to his playboy reputation in his younger years.
Charles, in particular, disapproved of Andrew taking the trade role, said Tessa Dunlop, an historian and author of a book about Queen Elizabeth II and her husband Philip. “It was a sop to the late queen,” Dunlop said.
“To be fair to the current King Charles, he was dead set against it,” she said.
“He knew that it would be like sort of putting an alcoholic in an off-licence. He just knew that it was a poor fit for Andrew being a trade envoy with access to untold bounties and women, which is precisely what happened.”
Concerns extended beyond temperament.
Financial and security advisers to the royal family raised objections to dozens of proposals he brought forward as trade envoy, many of which were blocked over fears of reputational, financial or security harm, according to the former security official.
“There were an endless number of deals that had to be killed,” the former official said, describing a constant stream of “flaky transactions that he produced while in that role that had to be kiboshed because they were so fraught with security issues. They all involved shady people with shady propositions.”
The former official noted that Andrew and Mandelson met Epstein together on more than one occasion. “This whole notion of sharing information with him - it’s no coincidence that both gentlemen now are facing the same dilemma.”
Among the revelations from millions of documents released recently by the US Justice Department is evidence that Mountbatten-Windsor shared details of official overseas visits - including trips to Singapore, Hong Kong and Vietnam - with Epstein, the convicted sex offender.
While the Thames Valley police, who are leading the investigation, did not cite a specific reason for his arrest, it is believed to be linked to the disclosure of such confidential information.
Among the most contentious episodes during his time as trade envoy was the sale of Mountbatten-Windsor’s marital home, Sunninghill Park, a wedding gift from Queen Elizabeth II.
For five years it sat unsold on the market. Then, suddenly, in 2007, it sold for about US$20 million - US$4m above the asking price - to an offshore company later revealed to be linked to Timur Kulibayev, the billionaire son-in-law of Nursultan Nazarbayev, Kazakhstan’s president at the time.
Andrew visited Kazakhstan repeatedly in official and private capacities and, according to news reports, spent a weekend goose hunting with Nazarbayev. The property’s inflated sale price intensified concerns about overlap between Mountbatten-Windsor’s official access and private relationships.
Mountbatten-Windsor defended the sale when it became public, telling the Telegraph newspaper: “It’s not my business the second the price is paid. If that is the offer, I’m not going to look a gift horse in the mouth and suggest they have overpaid me.”
Kulibayev later stepped down as head of a Kazakh business lobbying group amid allegations of corruption.
Supporters maintained that Andrew was advancing British interests and that his engagement with unsavoury figures was at times unavoidable in international commerce.
Critics argued that other royals - including Prince Edward, Duke of Kent when he undertook similar trade work - managed such roles without attracting comparable controversy.
Andrew Lownie, historian and author of Entitled: The Rise and Fall of the House of York, said in an interview that he has spent years attempting to access official files relating to Mountbatten-Windsor’s work as trade envoy.
Under the UK’s 20-year rule, documents from 2001 to 2005 should ordinarily have been transferred to the National Archives, Lownie said, but so far have not been released.
Lownie said the Government has cited a range of exemptions, including national security and international relations, to withhold material.
“Every single reason has been deployed to stop these papers getting out,” he said. “You have to ask why.”
He added that recent disclosures relating to Epstein have raised serious questions for the UK Government.
“He was a trade envoy acting on behalf of Britain, tasked by the Foreign Office - effectively a public servant,” Lownie said, adding that both government and palace should address “what they knew and when they knew it”.
Dunlop also pointed to constitutional protections, introduced during Prime Minister David Cameron’s government in 2010, to limit the scope of freedom of information requests relating to royal correspondence, which she said had reduced avenues for scrutiny.
The tightening of transparency rules has done little, however, to quiet broader concerns about Mountbatten-Windsor’s judgment while a government employee.
His role as trade envoy featured in his association with a British banker and developer, David Rowland, who in 2010 was forced to bow out as treasurer of the Conservative Party amid criticism that he had avoided paying taxes for decades.
That same year, Rowland paid about US$60,000 to assist Andrew and his ex-wife, Sarah Ferguson, to clear debts - months after the banker had been Andrew’s guest at Balmoral, the Scottish holiday home of the royal family. Rowland met with the queen and Charles, then a prince, during the visit.
Mountbatten-Windsor later brought Rowland’s son and business partner on official trips to China, Saudi Arabia and other countries, according to a 2019 investigation by the Mail on Sunday.
Early Epstein revelations forced Andrew to step down from the trade envoy position. His finances, however, continued to stir controversy.
In 2022, he sold a Swiss chalet that he had purchased eight years earlier to help fund his multimillion settlement with the family of Virginia Giuffre, who had sued the then-Duke of York, accusing him of sexual abuse arranged by Epstein.
In her memoir, Giuffre, who died by suicide last year, said she was trafficked by Epstein when she was 17 and had three sexual encounters with Mountbatten-Windsor.
Before selling the Swiss property, Mountbatten-Windsor had to pay millions to settle a legal claim brought by the previous owner, who had accused him of failing to pay the final US$8m instalment of the US$29m purchase of the chalet.
In a 2022 interview with the Washington Post, Isabelle de Rouvre, the previous owner of the chalet, said that Andrew’s lawyer had refused repeated entreaties to pay the owed amount, saying “there’s no money”.
In the end, she said she took less than was owed to resolve the matter, saying “I just don’t want to think about it anymore”.
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