One summer evening, a prominent British businessman opened his laptop and began typing a long email. In 2019, long before Prince Andrew, Duke of York, became just Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, there was much that broke my heart. Specifically, he wanted to warn the Prince of Wales that his brother’s business activities risked damaging his overall reputation. royal family.

He apologized for what he described as a “breach of protocol” and took the daring step of emailing the heir directly to the throne and copying the email to the late Queen’s lawyer.

It’s been almost seven years since I first saw that message. It was passed to me as part of a large cache of private correspondence between Andrew and his private bankers and business associates, David and Jonathan Rowland. The material was sensational. Did we finally get an answer to the age-old mystery of how Prince Andrew made his money?

In the Mail on Sunday that year, I revealed how the Duke of York worked with the Rowlands to enrich all three of them. It was a clever plan.

Together, the three men were courting some of the world’s most dubious regimes. It was all completely legal. For members of the royal family, the issue was one of ethics.

Here’s how it works: In his capacity as UK trade envoy, Prince Andrew will hear about all sorts of opportunities. From time to time, he provided information to the Rowlands, allowing them to stay ahead of the competition.

During that time, they traveled the world in search of clues for their business.

Another of Andrew’s tasks was to open doors and give them unique access to foreign royal families, heads of state, and chairs of multinational corporations.

For many years it has worked wonders. Traveling on private jets and shuttling between ambassadors’ residences and presidential palaces, the prince and his banker friends talked about seven- and eight-figure sums as if they were pennies.

Some of the messages they exchanged between 2008 and 2012 were surprising.

With offices in London, Luxembourg, Monaco and Moscow, these “very private” bankers (as they once described themselves in an email) were happy to do business with all kinds of bankers and boasted of “very strong connections and in some cases joint ventures.” [Joint Ventures]with adversaries including Russia, Belarus, and China.

The Chinese venture capitalists who planned their visit to Pyongyang to cultivate “Kim’s relatives” (in his words) also targeted “former and current heads of state” in various African hellholes, including Guinea-Bissau, the Central African Republic, and South Sudan. Something edgy.

I was surprised. What exactly was Queen Elizabeth’s favorite son doing?

Shortly after the Rowlands’ private bank was established, it was raided by 40 armed police.

The Rowlands were furious and complained privately that they were being treated like “mafia drug lords.”

It was a terrible look, but Andrew continued to stick by them, just as Jeffrey Epstein and his wife Sarah Ferguson remained friends long after he was exposed as a pedophile.

No wonder someone thought that the future king should know. The businessman who tipped off Prince Charles in 2019 also volunteered to help lawyers with their investigation.

Could the catastrophe currently engulfing the monarchy have been avoided? By that time Andrew had long ceased to be our trade envoy.

What would happen if Andrew began to live a life of exemplary public service, like his queen mother?

The truth is, by 2019, it was too late. There were too many skeletons in Andrew’s closet for Prince Charles or anyone else to magically exorcise them.

I don’t know how the Palace reacted to this email, but if they had taken it seriously, they would have at least been prepared for the crisis that was about to come.