Prince Andrew may have been frozen out of the British royal family yet again, but another royal family seems keen to adopt him.
The prince has been gifted the use of a palace in Abu Dhabi by the country’s autocratic elite, the royal historian and freedom-of-information campaigner Andrew Lownie will claim in a hotly anticipated biography of the prince to be published next year, the Daily Beast can reveal.
The Daily Beast reported this week that several of Andrew’s friends say he could “do a Harry” and flee the U.K. for the Middle East next year, feeling that he has been unfairly treated over his relationship with Yang Tengbo.
Yang is a Chinese businessman formerly based in London who has been unmasked as a suspected Chinese spy. He successfully cultivated a close personal and business relationship with Andrew after Andrew was expelled from the royal family (for the first time) following his disastrous BBC interview about his relationship with the pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. Documents found in Yang’s possession highlighting “main talking points” for a call with Andrew said he was “in a desperate situation and will grab on to anything.”
Yang ran the Chinese arm of Andrew’s Pitch@Palace initiative, and Andrew was entitled to a 2 percent cut of any investment deals made.
It is a matter of public record that Andrew freely used private palaces owned by the UAE’s ruling House of Nahyan when he was a trade ambassador for the U.K. over a decade ago. However, Lownie, who is writing a biography of the prince due out next year called Entitled: The Controversial Lives of the Duke and Duchess of York, told the Daily Beast that Andrew continues to have exclusive access to at least one fully staffed private palace in the country, despite not technically owning it.
The revelation will raise yet further questions about how Andrew funds his lavish lifestyle.
Fears that foreign powers have compromised Andrew have escalated in the wake of the stunning financial and espionage scandal roiling the U.K. establishment.
Andrew has been entirely excluded from the royal family’s Christmas celebrations as a result of the latest scandal. He seems to have exhausted the patience of his brother, King Charles III, who had slowly brought Andrew and his ex-wife, Sarah Ferguson, back into royal life.
Lownie, who has waged a decade-long freedom-of-information war with royal authorities over access to a laundry list of concealed documents, told the Daily Beast: “Andrew has been given the use of a palace by the Abu Dhabi authorities. It costs them nothing. He has been spending a lot of time out there in recent years, and I am told by reliable sources that from next year he may divide his time between the Middle East and the U.K. He is expected to go between the two.
“It makes sense for him; there is good weather, he is treated with deference, there are a lot of golf courses, and he can conduct his business affairs however he sees fit.
“The whole family are up to their necks in it. The children, Beatrice and Eugenie, have been out in the Middle East, and so has Fergie.”
Prince Andrew no longer has a spokesperson; a solicitor who has worked for him extensively and a PR executive thought to sometimes help him did not respond to requests for comment.
Lownie points out that it is well established that Andrew and his family have admitted to or been proven to have accepted money from dubious foreign individuals.
In just one recent case, a lawsuit revealed that Andrew, his ex-wife, and their daughters received a series of payments totaling £1.4 million ($1.75m) from an alleged fraudster, Selman Turk. Turk allegedly duped a Turkish heiress into sending Andrew the money. Turk, who denies the allegations, also won a “People’s Choice” award at one of Andrew’s Pitch@Palace events. Turk has been jailed for contempt of court for failing to produce documents as ordered. The case is ongoing.
In another widely publicized case, Andrew received £3 million ($3.75m) more than the asking price for his home when he sold it in 2007 to the son-in-law of the then-president of Kazakhstan, Nursultan Nazarbayev. The house sat empty for years, was demolished and rebuilt, and is now empty again.
It was first reported in 2010 that Andrew had free use of a “very impressive” and “gilded mini-palace” in Abu Dhabi. Andrew’s then-spokesman confirmed he was “given the use of a villa by the Abu Dhabi royal family” for both personal and professional use.
Norman Baker, a former British government minister who wrote extensively about the royals’ finances in a book entitled And What Do You Do?—which has a chapter about Prince Andrew titled “The Grand Old Duke of Sleaze”—told the Daily Beast: “While Andrew’s involvement with Epstein was pretty distasteful, the real scandal is his abuse of his position as U.K. trade envoy to enrich himself. Why was he engaged so heavily with this Chinese person, and why was the Chinese person engaged with him? The only logical explanation was he wanted money because he was, to quote the Chinese alleged spy’s email, ‘desperate.’
“Andrew suffers from a fatal combination of arrogance, stupidity, and greed, which leads him to do the things he does. But actually, the practice of taking something for nothing from an external source, the practice of dealing with unpleasant regimes across the world, the practice of being prepared to hide everything—these are traits that apply to Charles and the rest of the royal family. It’s just they’re rather more subtle about it.
“It wasn’t very long ago that Charles was captured accepting bags of cash, thousands of pounds of cash in Fortnum & Mason bags, from an overseas donor of dubious integrity. He looked like a mafia boss. So, Andrew in a sense is no different from anybody else. He’s just more clumsy and stupid about it.”
if Andrew does end up in Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates, he will be able to compare notes with another disgraced royal, Spain’s King Juan Carlos, who has lived there since 2020, when he fled Spain following a corruption scandal.
