In 2021, the Windsors were in desperate need of a royal scapegoat, and Prince Michael of Kent fit the bill – someone took pains to feed a lot of information to British outlets like the Times and the Telegraph about Michael’s shady ties to Vladimir Putin and Putin’s oligarchs, and the Times even got Michael in some kind of sting operation, where he was making promises to make introductions with various Putin cronies. After Russia invaded Ukraine, Prince Michael of Kent and his wife supposedly retired last year, and Prince Michael finally shut down his Russian-consulting business this year. So it feels sort of like beating a dead horse for the Times to still have ongoing investigations about Prince Michael, but here we are. In 2018, he exploited his royal connections and government connections to get a British visa for one of Putin’s cronies.

Prince Michael of Kent’s private office lobbied a senior Foreign Office official to help obtain a fast-track UK visa for a Russian financier closely linked to a sanctioned oligarch, The Times can reveal. The equerry of the prince, the late Queen’s cousin, emailed a diplomat in Moscow asking him if he could “expedite” an application by Maxim Viktorov, a 50-year-old businessman. Viktorov was able to get on a flight to London arriving six days later.

At the time of the intervention in 2018, the prince was the global ambassador and part owner of a UK finance firm that was in the process of securing £100,000 of investment from an organisation run by Viktorov. Viktorov, a former adviser to the Russian Ministry of Defence, was at the time a close adviser to Boris Rotenberg, a Russian oligarch who was sanctioned in the US after Russia’s invasion of Crimea in 2014, as Rotenberg was deemed to be a close associate of President Putin. Rotenberg has been under UK and EU sanctions since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Last night the government defended the decision to process the visa for Viktorov through its “priority” service, which allows customers to expedite processing in exchange for a fee, and after the intervention from the prince’s office, saying it does so “where there is a clear national interest — such as to support inward investment”. However, the disclosures raise concerns given that the visa application was made in the months after the 2018 nerve agent poisonings in Salisbury, at a time when Russia was already considered a significant threat to Britain’s security.

They also renew questions about Michael’s financial interests and the potential for members of the extended royal family to risk damaging the monarchy’s reputation through the use of their royal positions.

The new findings come from a three-month investigation by The Times, the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) and the Russian independent news website iStories, alongside other international outlets including Le Monde and Der Spiegel. The collaboration has obtained tens of thousands of emails and corporate records relating to Viktorov’s business affairs between 2012 and 2019.

[From The Times]

The Times piece lays out the case against Prince Michael and his equerry, who is a royal employee, not someone employed by Michael’s firm. Basically, the equerry contacted a British diplomat and got a fast-tracked visa for this shady dude who (as luck would have it) sounds like a very well-connected Russian spy. Of course it looks bad and of course more should have happened to Prince Michael, because he’s not just meddling in national and international politics, he’s openly taking bribes from very corrupt and deadly people. It’s a wonder Prince Michael hasn’t been “accidentally” defenestrated. Anyway, since the British papers seem so obsessed with figuring out which royals are grifters, they might want to take a gander at this mess.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red.