A BBC investigation found Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor received millions of pounds from oligarch Timur Kulibayev, who used funds loaned from a firm implicated in criminal corruption. The oligarch purchased Sunninghill Park in Berkshire from the then-prince for £15m, with the assistance of funds from Enviro Pacific Investments.
According to reports, Italian prosecutors concluded that the firm had received cash from an alleged bribery scheme in 2007. The revelations raised questions about whether Andrew may have inadvertently benefited from the proceeds of crime and whether he and his advisers conducted the proper checks when the offer was being accepted.
Purchaser, the Kazakh billionaire, Timur Kulibayev, was one of the most influential officials in the Central Asian country’s oil and gas industry. The billionaire’s lawyers told the BBC he has never engaged in bribery or corruption, and the funds used to acquire Sunninghill Park were entirely legitimate.
The BBC investigation reported, Tom Keatinge, director of the Centre for Finance and Security, said that the purchase should have prompted detailed checks to ensure it was not “helping to launder the proceeds of corruption”.
Kulibayev reportedly paid £3m more than the asking price and an estimated £7m more than the property’s market value.
The property, Sunninghill Park, was gifted to Andrew by his mother, Queen Elizabeth II, as a wedding gift in 1986, when he married Sarah Ferguson. It boasted 12 bedrooms, 12 matching bathrooms and six reception rooms.
In 2007, the offer for Sunninghill Park came from Timur Kulibayev, who was the son-in-law of Kazakhstan’s then-president, Nursultan Nazarbayev.
Questions were raised about the deal’s links to corruption in 2012, when media reports said Italian prosecutors were investigating allegations involving Kulibayev.
The allegations included the possibility that bribes might have been used to fund the purchase of Sunninghill Park through Enviro Pacific Investments – the company which has now been confirmed as partly funding the deal. These investigations did not lead to any charges against Kulibayev.
The BBC has seen documents from a series of court cases in 2016 and 2017 which together show how Italian prosecutors concluded that Enviro Pacific Investments had received cash from a bribery scheme.
Italian court documents from 2016 and 2017, show prosecutors concluded that Enviro Pacific received funds from a bribery network involving Aventall, a company allegedly used to channel corrupt payments. In one case, Italian oil executive Agostino Bianchi pleaded guilty to bribing Kazakh officials, with Aventall cited as part of the payment structure.
Kulibayev was not charged. The prosecutors stated that “open sources” indicated a connection between Enviro Pacific and Kulibayev. However, the Milan proceedings were dismissed in January 2017, in part because prosecutors could not link the payments to specific contracts or definitively identify the public officials who received the funds.
The oligarch’s lawyers stated that the funds used to purchase Sunninghill, including loaned funds from Enviro Pacific, which were later repaid with interest, had been entirely legitimate and that all appropriate due diligence would have been carried out at the time. Kulibayev paid the substantial amount of £15m to ensure his success in buying the property, as there was a competing bidder, his lawyers said.
The BBC reports that there is no evidence to suggest the former prince was aware of the source of funds used by Kulibayev to purchase the property in question.
Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor has been contacted for comment.
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‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.express.co.uk ’
