Andrew fixed palace visit for firm with £1.4m deal with ex-wife

Mr Evers told the BBC they then met the Queen, although Mr Bloom disputed this.

Both Mr Evers and Mr Bloom were invited by the then-prince to his Pitch@Palace event – a Dragons’ Den-style business pitching competition – at nearby St James’s Palace later that day, and they dined that evening with Andrew, Ms Ferguson and their daughter Princess Beatrice.

Ms Ferguson was working with Pegasus Group Holdings at the time of the palace visit, while she was Duchess of York, to promote plans to use thousands of solar power generators to mine Bitcoin at a remote site in the Arizona desert.

But the project ultimately failed with only 615 of the planned 16,000 generators acquired and just $33,779 (about £25,000) in cryptocurrency mined.

In April 2021, some investors took legal action, claiming millions of dollars of investor funds were unaccounted for. A tribunal awarded the investors $4.1m, but Mr Bloom is seeking permission to appeal.

The revelations add to growing questions about how Andrew and his former wife have funded their lifestyle, as well as long-standing concerns about their business connections and that the then-prince may have used his royal titles and connections for private gain.

On Thursday evening, Buckingham Palace announced that it was starting the formal process of stripping Andrew of his royal titles and that he would be losing his Windsor mansion, following intense criticism of his links with the billionaire paedophile Jeffrey Epstein.

Andrew and Ms Ferguson did not respond to a detailed list of questions about their involvement with Mr Bloom and the crypto-mining venture.