King Charles was warned as long ago as 2019 that the Royal Family’s name was being ‘abused’ by Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor’s business associations, The Mail on Sunday can reveal.

In a bombshell email, a whistleblower told the Palace that the former Duke had secret financial links to controversial millionaire financier David Rowland, who was abusing his royal links.

Messages seen by this newspaper also appear to show that Andrew – who was sensationally arrested on Thursday over suspicions of misconduct in public office – allowed Mr Rowland to effectively join in with his official duties.

The cache of emails threaten to draw Charles further into the crisis, triggered by Andrew’s links to Jeffrey Epstein, and allegations he passed potentially confidential and sensitive documents to the convicted paedophile.

Andrew once told Epstein that Mr Rowland was his ‘trusted money man’. The banker and his son Jonathan joined Andrew on trips he made in his official capacity as a taxpayer-funded trade envoy between 2001 and 2011, visiting places such as China and former Soviet states.

Over a period of several years, Andrew repeatedly alerted Mr Rowland to business opportunities arising from his work.

Mr Rowland once gave Andrew’s ex-wife Sarah Ferguson £40,000 to help clear debts and, in 2017, paid off a £1.5million loan for Andrew.

In August 2019, a whistleblower who had detailed knowledge of Andrew’s business dealings with Mr Rowland sent an email to Charles, then Prince of Wales, via the royal lawyers Farrer & Co, warning of ‘David Rowland’s abuse of the Royal Family’.

It said: ‘HRH the Duke of York’s actions suggest that his Royal Highness considers his relationship with David Rowland more important than that of his family.’

The whistleblower then sent a second email to Mr Rowland himself, copying in Clive Alderton, Charles’s private secretary, and Mark Bridges, the late Queen’s solicitor at Farrer & Co.

That message said: ‘The evidence provided unequivocally proves that you have abused the Royal Family’s name.’

The email further alleged that Mr Rowland ‘paid HRH The Duke of York to procure a Luxembourg Banking Licence’ for his private bank, Banque Havilland, and included what were claimed to be Andrew’s bank account details.

The whistleblower email forms part of a raft of new MoS revelations about Andrew’s business activities, including:

Andrew told Jonathan Rowland he’d ‘had a very supportive chat’ with PM David Cameron and Labour leader Ed Miliband, apparently at Prince William’s wedding in April 2011, when questions were being raised over his trade envoy position following this newspaper’s publication of the now infamous photograph of him clutching 17-year-old Virginia Giuffre.
Andrew secretly used an official trade mission to help strike a multi-million-pound deal for his business associates to sell oil to China, with the hope of making ‘tons of money’ with Epstein.
A British ambassador warned the Government more than two decades ago that Andrew’s behaviour as trade envoy was damaging his country and the Royal Family.

The MoS can also reveal that Andrew invited Jonathan Rowland to a meeting at Buckingham Palace attended by the UK’s ambassador to Montenegro to help boost the Rowlands’ business ambitions.

The ambassador put government staff at the Rowlands’ disposal, while Andrew gave David Rowland his schedule for a trip to Montenegro as UK trade envoy.

Emails show that a British diplomat in Moscow told the Rowlands the Palace event was ‘a great success’ and connected them with the British embassy in the Serbian capital Belgrade, which covered Montenegro at the time. ‘If there is anything the commercial team… can do to help, please do not hesitate to contact’ them, he wrote, copying in the relevant official.

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