Yet Another Layer in the Andrew Saga

0:01Thousands of Andrew emails were given to the Palace in 2020. Prince Harry is under pressure over charity abuse allegations, and Prince William won't do his duty overseas. I'm Jack Royston, Newsweek's Chief Royal Correspondent, and this is Newsweek's Royal Report. Hello, listeners, and welcome to the show. Now, we have had some major news out about Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, and particularly this key question of what the palace knew and when. Now, this is a slightly different branch to the Andrew scandal than what we usually talk about. Usually it's all about Jeffrey Epstein and that is the centrepiece of it.

0:39This is a kind of sidebar to the Epstein scandal, which is about, it's connected because there are allegations that Andrew leaked confidential government documents to Epstein. But this is actually an allegation that he may have done something similar and leaked some confidential documents to another major banking contact of his, or two in fact. So there's a guy called David Rowlands who was a financial advisor to Andrew and his son Jonathan Rowlands. They are the two relevant people here. Now, they got into a dispute with a former member of their staff who appears to have basically at some point, or they argued, took a whole load of Jonathan Ronan's emails, copied them onto a laptop and then, you know, kind of made off with them, stole them effectively.

1:22This is the allegation against this staff member. And it has now come out in court documents that were actually first released in 2021 and 2022 that have been re-examined through fresh eyes now that this more recent scandal has blown up. And it turns out that some court judgments indicate that this cache of emails from Jonathan Ronan's email accounts was given to the palace in 2020. Now, the Ronan family might well claim they've done absolutely nothing wrong. and in some ways they are not primarily the target of this reporting because the target of this reporting is Andrew. The kind of dispute that they had with the staff member and any questions that may be asked of them in terms of their conduct are kind of separate to what I'm talking about here.

2:06What I'm talking about here is whether Andrew was leaking to the Rowland family information that could have helped them invest money or even beyond what they invest, how they generally manage their investments at the time of the collapse of the Icelandic bank industry. Now, this is, especially for younger listeners, this is going some way back, it was massive at the time. It was so huge, gargantuan sums of money were lost when all these Icelandic banks went under, including public money for local councils, for really important services that were there to help the community. Andrew appears to have leaked some or information to Jonathan Rowland.

2:47And we're saying, you know, here's some information ahead of you making your decisions. And that we know that from the Epstein files. But this is a new piece of the puzzle that shows that some of those emails that were obviously in Jonathan Rowland's email inbox were given to the palace in 2020. So in other words, obviously, I'm sure they had a lot of material. It's entirely possible, you know, there were 30 ,000 emails in this cache of documents. So if somebody dumped 30 ,000 emails on me and I had a day job, it would obviously take me quite a long time to go through them. We don't know how much the palace were told about what they should have been looking for.

3:22And it could well be that they weren't told anything, that they just got given this huge volume of material that's predominantly about a businessman who, you know, we don't know to what extent they understood the nature of the relationship between the Roland family and Andrew. But the timeline for why the Palace should have known they need to take this really seriously is really, really crucial. So they were given this, according to the court papers, in 2020. So that is after Andrews Carr Crescent's view of Emily Maitlis on BBC Newsnight in 2019. The one where he said he couldn't sweat and he went to a Pizza Express.

3:57And on the back of that interview, that was November 2019, obviously it was total chaos. He came off the back of it. the palace realized that he'd done something terrible. And he was basically made to issue this statement of saying that, you know, expressing sympathy to Epstein's victims and stepping back from public life. And in that statement, he had also offered to cooperate with the relevant authorities in America. And so in 2020, the FBI and the US Department of Justice were actually pursuing Andrew's testimony. They went through formal channels. They put something something called a mutual legal assistance request, an MLA request, which is where the US Department of Justice approaches the British Home Office and says, one of your citizens is relevant to our investigation and we want to talk to them.

4:43And they were approaching him not as a target, i.e. not as a suspect, but as a witness. And to our knowledge, Andrew never actually gave that witness testimony, despite having said he would help and cooperate. Now, so what's really interesting about this is in the midst of all that going on, you know, formal requests to the British government, Her Majesty's government at the time, because it was still Queen Elizabeth II, to deliver up Andrew for an interview. The palace get given this massive, massive cachet of a banker's private emails. And no doubt they must have been told something about why.

5:18Like, you don't just go and give the palace random cachets of thousands and thousands of documents. They must have known, they must have been told something to help them identify the fact that this kind of file of information contained stuff that was relevant to them. And it must, you know, this came from a former employee of the Rowland family. So you kind of think they must have been told that they were looking out for Andrew. And so what they should have done, this went to a man whose job title at the time was the Lord Chamberlain, not the current serving Lord Chamberlain, the previous one, Lord Peel.

5:56If that name rings a bell to regular listeners, it might be because I had Robert Hardman on the show some weeks back. And he told this extraordinary story about Andrew physically assaulting the master of the household. And the master of the household at the time, or what was called a kinetic blow, landed to this man over an argument about a room that Andrew wanted to book. And it got to the Lord Chamberlain, Lord Peel. So the master of the household, very senior position, went to the Lord Chamberlain, who is the most senior figure in the royal household, the boss of the whole bang shoot. So he's not a kind of direct spokesperson for the king or queen or a kind of advisor to them, Elizabeth II at the time, actually, to the queen.

6:39but he is the kind of professional head boss of the whole kind of bang shoot. You know, all of those footmen and, you know, equerries and all of those people who work for the palace across all the divisions of the royal household. They all report ultimately to the Lord Chamberlain. So he's a very, very senior figure. Obviously, he would be a very busy man. And I'm sure he did not have time personally to go through 30 ,000 emails, which is exactly why what the palace should have done with this at that point is calling specialist lawyers, calling outside legal counsel and give these emails to them and ask them to go through this cache of documents with a careful legal eye to what they should do about it, whether there was anything that required a report to police or that might assist the FBI's ongoing investigation in America, for which the Home Office had received an MLA request, and what actions they might need to take internally to address these issues.

7:44And we don't know what the palace did. I mean, maybe they did do all of that, in which case, hold on a minute, why on earth is this the first we're hearing about them having these documents? Like, this is crazy. But Andrew was a public servant at the time that he sent these emails. He was a trade envoy for the British government, not to mention being a working royal, which is a public, you know, to me, that is a public office. You are a public servant. You receive, you benefit from public money and access to public buildings and taxpayer-funded police protection because of your role as a public figure.

8:18So there is no doubt in my mind that there is a public interest justification for scrutiny and accountability of this. And if the palace had done all that, then surely it should have triggered a wider investigation into Andrew's emails and what he'd been sending people, at which point they could have and should have come across some of the material that was being exchanged between him and Jeffrey Epstein, as long as it hadn't been purged, as long as it had been preserved. And so there are still major, major questions about why the palace didn't do more to take Andrew on. and is, you know, one of my most recent shows, I was talking about the fact that the Queen got him the trade envoy job to begin with, and it might be that her protection helped shield him from being investigated for all of this stuff.

9:12But they have issued a statement, and this is what the palace said. Since there is an ongoing police inquiry concerning Mr. Mountbatten-Windsor, it is not possible to provide any comment on these matters. So that is obviously a very generic response. I mean, it's not completely illegitimate. if they obviously would not want to prejudice the outcome of the police investigation, but also at the same time, there will come a point when the police investigation has concluded. Whether it's concluded via a trial, Andrew being charged and put on trial or not, we do not know. It may be that it concludes and the police take no further action against him.

9:46But either way, at some point, this police inquiry will be wrapped up and we need to make sure that there is a proper investigation into how all of this was allowed to happen. and it can't just be left to the palace to mark their own homework. This is an issue for British democracy. And there are just altogether too many times in Britain when we just allow the royals to just do their thing and major institutions just say, look, you just sort it out and we're not going to intervene. We're not going to disturb you. And this is a situation where parliament really needs to step in and order an inquiry, whether it's a...

10:23I would probably favour a select committee inquiry before Parliament, or sometimes they do judge-led inquiries in Britain. I actually am not a fan of judge-led inquiries because they take forever. They take absolutely ages to return, to even begin. They take years just to start, and I think people want answers faster than that. So I think my preference would be for a parliamentary inquiry into why it was that our monarchy was not able to stop Andrew from doing some of the things that people have criticised him for morally. Now, he has always denied Epstein-related wrongdoing. Obviously, the most disturbing allegations in the Epstein scandal relate to sex trafficking.

11:06And Virginia Jeffrey said that she was trafficked to London, New York and the US Virgin Islands and forced to have sex with Andrew, which he denies. So that is obviously the most serious bit of it. But even outside of those allegations, you have all kinds of other conduct by Andrew, you know, across, you know, spanning everything from other sexual allegations. You know, we learned a little bit more this week about the the allegation that's now arisen at Royal Ascot. You know, I spoke previously about the fact that Thames Valley Police now looking at an allegation that there was sexually inappropriate behavior by Andrew at Royal Ascot.

11:44We now know a little bit more that the woman accusing him was working as a waitress. So she was a member of staff at Ascot races. And we think that this allegation was on a day when the Queen was there. So it's, look, there is so much for Parliament to unpack. But there is one single problem that binds all of these issues together, which is just the fact that Andrew, in all these different aspects of his life, was not held to account. And so the question is, why not? Was it that the Queen shielded him? Was it that politicians were just too scared of taking on the monarchy? Was it that Andrew was a bully?

12:21Was it that there just aren't systems and processes for removing a member of the royal family? Whatever the answer to that question, there needs to be recommendations by somebody independent, such as a parliamentary select committee, on how we can change the structure and systems that govern the monarchy to stop an Andrew situation from arising again in the future. And there may be monarchists who feel very anxious and nervous and cautious about that and feel that that is in itself an attack on the monarchy. But look at the damage that Andrew has done. If you can change the system in such a way that you stop a repeat of Andrew, then you save the monarchy from all of the reputational Armageddon that Andrew has inflicted on them.

13:04Like if you could wind the clock back, what would you do? This is the best way to look at it. If you could choose now to change the past in order to protect the monarchy, what would you choose to do? There's no way that you would leave Andrew to cause the havoc that he has caused, to have his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein, to seemingly appear to leak these documents, both to Epstein and to other business contacts. You would just simply never do that because that is very obviously, when we are looking with hindsight, that is very obviously the thing that has damaged the monarchy. So we are right now living before the next crisis with an opportunity to do things that could prevent that future crisis from happening.

13:47And so we should do the same thing now that we would do if we were going back in time to before Andrew had been involved in all of this stuff. And what you would do very simply is create systems and processes that would allow the palace to stop Andrew, to hold him to account and to prevent him from behaving terribly to people. Whether it's that you believe Virginia's allegations against Andrew or whether you believe Andrew's denials. Maybe you do. Maybe some people still believe Andrew. there is it's very clear there's a huge amount of material accusing Andrew of a whole load of different terrible things from Virginia and the sex trafficking allegations to staff accusing him of bullying you know the servants who said that they were you know they were verbally abused for not arranging his teddies properly to the diplomats who felt that he you know ransacked Britain's reputation on the international stage by being offensive to people or dismissing his duties.

14:45And there's just a massive amount of material, not to mention, of course, Sarah Ferguson's spending sprees and all the money that she wasted and needing to be bailed out by the Queen. Fergie needed the Queen to bail her out for her debt. Andrew needed the Queen and other members of the royal family to bail him out by paying off Virginia Geoffrey. So there's just so much. I don't really see how anybody can plausibly claim, and I don't think that they do claim, that Andrew has done nothing wrong. So it should be fairly uncontroversial at this point to argue that the palace should have done something to stop him.

15:22And that is not withstanding his right to a fair trial, which he has. But morally, we are in a position now where I think it is really very uncontroversial and straightforward to say that he behaved in ways that were morally wrong. And so it's not in any way controversial to suggest that there should be an investigation and inquiry into what how what the palace could do to stop that happening again in the future and doing so making those changes creating systems for managing royal family members who misbehave would protect the monarchy in the future not damage it and on that note i'm going to take a quick break but just a reminder to rate and review the royal report on apple or spotify or wherever you get your favorite shows when I'm back, why Prince Harry's African Park scandal just isn't going to ever go away.

16:15Hello, listeners, and welcome back to the show. Now, Prince Harry has been in Arizona where he was helping and one of his organizations raised money. That organization is called African Parks. It is controversial because of allegations that African Parks rangers tortured and even raped tribespeople, Bakka tribespeople, in Odzala Kukua National Park in the Republic of Congo. Now, this issue has been going on for years, and it's actually got to the point where an outside investigation was brought in by a company of lawyers called Omnia Strategy, run by Tony Blair, former British Prime Minister's wife, Cherie Blair.

16:53She's a lawyer by trade, and so her organisation had a look at this, and it did uphold that human rights abuses occur. They did not publish the specifics, so we don't know exactly which human rights abuses were upheld, and specifically, crucially, whether the rape allegation was upheld. Though, obviously, viewers will judge for themselves what they think about that. But Prince Harry has been under pressure to basically resign from this organisation, cut ties, and walk away from it, to acknowledge, basically, the counter-argument that whether they were trying, or he was trying to promote conservation, to promote the environment, to promote positive impacts on Africa or not, it's become toxic.

17:38It is termed toxic. And he has rejected that. He has continued to work for the organization and obviously most recently in the last week or so has been out in Arizona helping them with a$1 billion fundraiser. So the organization, the charity that has been representing the BACA tribespeople, who obviously aren't exactly on Instagram, so they can't necessarily represent themselves, is called Survival International. Survival International represents indigenous people and tribespeople all over the world, and it's taken up the cause of the Baka people in Congo. And they say, basically, that Harry should quit, that he should turn away from this organisation, and that it's not just about isolated incidents of abuse targeting specific tribespeople.

18:22It's about the whole model of conservation that African parks promotes being fundamentally corrupt. And what they say, they call it fortress conservation. And what they say is basically that African parks approach is to have rangers who keep local people and keep tribes people out of the rainforest, turning the rainforest into this fortress, and then argue that they're basically doing a good thing and that they're saving the environment and making the world a better place. But actually what they're doing is they're taking, targeting indigenous communities who have actually protected and lived off the rainforest for centuries upon centuries upon centuries and still effectively live predominantly a pre-industrial lifestyle.

19:06These people are hunter-gatherers. They go, they collect honey, they hunt for their dinner. And that is not what has got us into the problems we're in right now. We are not dealing with climate change because of hunter-gatherers who go into the forest and hunt their dinner and collect honey and live off the forest. We are in the problem we are right now because of all the jet setters who fly around the world and people overusing their cars or all the plastics that we're using, the food we eat and everything else that we do. So that is what has caused climate change. That is what environmentally we need to tackle.

19:43We do not and should not be taking this problem out on people who have not caused it. And so one question that sometimes arises is, you know, is it that they're kind of hunting rhinos for their ivory? And so what Survival International says to that is, well, if they are, why aren't they rich? You know, these are people who are starving because they've been excluded from the forest. They are not rich people. You can tell from their clothes and the way they dress and the lifestyle they live, you can instantly tell that these people aren't rich. They're not, you know, super rich poachers who are selling ivory on the black market to make, you know, dizzying sums of money.

20:17so harry has chosen to stick by african parks and he is not going to be left alone to do that you know and survival international are going for him again and again and again and um so a statement that they released to newsweek and to other organizations too pulls no punches and this is what it says so caroline pierce director of survival international released a statement saying it is outrageous to see harry's continued support to african parks despite the horrific human rights abuse is committed by its rangers against the backer but they've also got a quote in their press release given to them by a community leader from the backer community who they say they're not naming because they don't want him they don't want retribution by african parks rangers against this person um and he or she i actually don't know the gender um told survival international we don't work with them the way the african parks treat us here is violent so basically um survival International are not they're just not going to let this go and I want to talk a little bit about the reason why so I've spoken about the actual human rights abuses themselves which were incredibly harrowing I've covered those on past shows this one woman who said she was raped and she said she you know it was nighttime her husband was away or her partner was away and the an African parks ranger came and took her out into the forest and she still had her her young newborn baby who she was clutching to her chest as he raped her in the forest.

21:47So it was incredibly harrowing stuff. There was another guy who talks about being taught a particular method of torture. I seem to recall you're kind of like hung by a rope off a tree and then whipped, I think it was. So it's very, very harrowing stuff. And the line from Survival International currently is that some of that violence or some of that mistreatment is continuing even after all of the exposure and press coverage of these stories. But the other issue that lurks in the background here, it relates to what African Parks is actually trying to do in these jungles. It's not just the Congo, they operate in other parts of Africa too.

22:29But one of the things they do that Survival International has spoken about before is they do what they call sustainable or ethical tourism, where even though the baka are not allowed into the forest, they will fly in people from the West, you know, rich people, basically, who can then pay huge sums of money to stay in eco lodges in the national park and have a wonderful time, basically have an incredible experience, you know, in nature, and then fly home, also pumping the atmosphere full of carbon, and go back to their ordinary lives afterwards. And that money that's generated helps to sustain African parks.

23:08But there's another issue too, and this is something that I know that survival, because I speak to them quite regularly about this, and I know that they're watching out for, which is that African parks actually want to create carbon credit schemes in some of these rainforests. Now, they do not, as of this moment, have a carbon credit scheme in Odzala-Kakua National Park. And who knows, maybe they never will. But this is one of the things that I think survival are really watching out for is to try to see whether that becomes something that, you know, looms on the horizon in the future. And so they have a section of their website where they talk about wanting to do this.

23:44So I will read a little section of it. So you can see I'm not just making this up. And so they actually have two already in existence. So they say carbon credit projects are currently being rolled out in several parks. These projects measure and verify the carbon storage emission reductions and additional carbon sequestration achieved through the protection and restoration of natural ecosystems. Credits are then sold to companies wanting to offset their own carbon footprint, generating sustainable long-term funding for conservation and community development within the protected areas. So that is kind of wild that you can, you know, I think, so let me actually, before I go into what I think are so problematic about this.

24:27Let me talk a little bit about the ones that already exist. So the ones that exist right now are predominantly focused on, I think, places where there is deforestation and maybe logging. They say currently our carbon credit program is focused on voluntary markets and avoided deforestation, providing an outcomes-based mechanism to measure, report, and verify the positive impacts of conservation efforts and mitigating deforestation and climate change effect. So if you are stopping active deforestation of a rainforest, then there is potentially a slightly more meaningful conversation to be had about these carbon credit programs, because you are potentially investing money in stopping trees that save the environment from being chopped down and removed.

25:17So let me talk about the two. You've got chinko in Central African Republic, a vast tract of intact savannah and tropical forest spanning over 64 ,000 kilometers squared in the Central African Republic. And then they've got another one, Penjury and West National Parks in Benin. And so I think that is, again, if I'm correct, that is another deforestation project, I believe. So if you're stopping trees from being chopped down, you have slightly more legitimate grounds for saying that the money we're being given by these mega rich companies who are polluters, you know, that's why you buy carbon credits.

25:54If you're a company, you buy carbon credits, unless you're an investor, because you can actually trade carbon credits. This is the other thing. You can invest in carbon credits in the same way you would invest in the stock market. There are these funds called ETFs and, you know, they go up and down. You can invest in gold, you can invest in Bitcoin, you can invest in carbon credits, you can invest in stocks and shares. And so either you're a company who is a polluter and you want to say, well, okay, sure, I pump the atmosphere full of greenhouse gas emissions, full of carbon, but it's okay because I also invest in these carbon offsetting projects that help to save the rainforest, which a lot of people who campaign on the environment are fundamentally opposed to.

26:40They say that that just encourages people to continue with their negative ways, to continue with their bad practices in a context where we needed to be doing absolutely everything humanly possible to have any chance at all of stopping climate change. So people who are into saving the environment are dead against carbon offsetting schemes anyway. But also, not only does the good examples of carbon offsetting potentially encourage companies to continue polluting, But there's a potential other risk here, which is to what extent does a natural resource that already exists, to what extent can you actually legitimately monetize the existence of that natural resource?

27:23So what I think Survival International are partly worried is going to happen here is that the back of people are being kept out of this rainforest as part of this kind of project to protect and preserve the rainforest. And so they're being constructed and framed as a threat to a rainforest that already exists and has been sustaining their tribes people for centuries. And then African Parks is going to come along at some point in the future. Now, they might deny this, but they might come along at some point in the future and say, well, actually, because we're protecting this rainforest, that's now hugely valuable.

27:58And we need to be given dizzying amounts of money by mega rich people in the West, in America and Britain and Europe, in order to preserve this rainforest so that it continues to take carbon out of the atmosphere. And that, you know, basically it's that becomes resource extraction. That becomes Western people going to Africa and doing the same thing that they did with the diamond mines and with the gold mines in, you know, whether it's South Africa or whether it's Democratic Republic of Congo, where, you know, that extraction of mineral and mining by Western companies has contributed to civil wars.