All of last week, as the British media danced around and executed wall-to-wall coverage of the Duchess of Sussex, I wondered where Prince Andrew was and what he was up to. The last time Andrew got major headlines was when his lawyers filed his legal response to Virginia Giuffre’s lawsuit. Andrew’s response was to mock a survivor of human trafficking as a money-hungry bitch and liar. Yeah. Meanwhile, there is still so much mystery about Andrew’s finances, what mummy is paying for and what happened to Andrew’s debt. Bloomberg (via the Daily Beast) had some news on that front:

Prince Andrew’s lavish lifestyle, conducted on a known income of a naval pension of around £20,000 ($27,000) has long been a true royal mystery. Even when he was receiving an annual stipend from his mother of £250,000 ($340,000), he appeared to live a flashy lifestyle of fancy holidays, fast cars, a $23 million Swiss chalet, and private jets way beyond his apparent means. No doubt the sale of a mansion given to him by his mother helped, especially as he sold it for £3 million ($4 million) more than the asking price to a Kazakh oligarch, who, after some delay, demolished it.

Now at least part of the answer to the riddle of Andrew’s enviable cash-flow situation is provided by a Bloomberg News investigation that has found a company controlled by one of the ruling British Conservative party’s major donors, David Rowland, sent £1.5 million ($2 million) to Andrew. Andrew promptly used the money to repay a loan for an equivalent amount from a private bank controlled by the Rowland family. Bloomberg News alleges that David Rowland’s company, Albany Reserves, “wired the money to a London account at Banque Havilland SA held by the queen of England’s second son in December 2017,” citing “interviews with two people familiar with the transactions and bank documents seen by Bloomberg News.”

Bloomberg adds: “The transfer was earmarked for repayment of a £1.5 million ($2 million) loan from Banque Havilland the prince had taken out just 11 days earlier.” In fact, Bloomberg makes clear, the loan had started out as “£1.25 million facility that had been extended or increased 10 times since 2015.”

Bloomberg reports Andrew “operated as an unofficial door opener for Rowland and his family for more than a decade” and says the loan was made despite the fact that Banque Havilland staff warned the loan was “not in line with the risk appetite of the bank,” according to “an internal credit application.”

A note on the document reportedly added that the unsecured loan, bearing interest of 8 percent, was granted in November 2017 because it opened up “further business potential with the royal family,” adding: “While the (increased) loan is unsecured and granted solely against the credibility of the applicant, both his position and that his mother is the sovereign monarch of the United Kingdom should provide access to funds for repayment if need be.” Bloomberg says the loan was then repaid using “£1,503,000 transferred to the prince from a Guernsey-registered company controlled by the Rowland family.”

A spokesperson for the Duke of York told Bloomberg News that Andrew “is entitled to a degree of privacy in conducting his entirely legitimate, personal financial affairs, on which all appropriate accounting measures are undertaken and all taxes duly paid.” A spokesman for Banque Havilland declined to comment to Bloomberg.

[From The Daily Beast]

I’m incredibly confused about what went down and why, but here’s what I think happened: Andrew got paid via “unsecured loan” in 2017 for selling access to himself and his family. Then when it came time to pay the “loan,” people from the same family (the Rowland family) paid Andrew, who then “paid” the loan. What in the money laundering?!? What kind of shady access scheme was Andrew even running? This whole thing is honestly par for the course for Andrew and Fergie – for decades, they’ve gone through these wild cycles were they’re suddenly flush with money out of nowhere and they pay off their “debts” and buy multi-million-dollar real estate, and then months later, they’re suddenly deeply poor and they need huge loans from their friends. Friends like Jeffrey Epstein. If you think this is messy for Andrew, you should see what Fergie’s financial crimes look like these days.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red.