MORE INVESTIGATIONS
Billionaire behind collapsed Icelandic bank lines up Spac payday
Start-up Better.com, which made headlines for a mass firing conducted on Zoom, will float in New York with a valuation of $7.7bn.
New riddle over missing £500,000: Russian banker donated cash for Prince Charles’s foundation – yet a year on, £200,000 is with one society fixer, £100,000 with another and the charity has nothing
A glamorous Belarusian investment banker can today be revealed as a central figure in a scheme to sell access to the Prince of Wales in exchange for donations to his charities.
The email that lays bare a very cosy deal: Man with the golden address book who demanded a £5,000 cut for setting up Prince Charles meeting
A major ethics investigation was last night launched into an extraordinary ‘cash for access’ scheme involving Prince Charles, which has been uncovered by The Mail on Sunday. A bombshell email reveals in excruciating detail how wealthy donors could pay £100,000 to secure a lavish dinner with the Prince of Wales and an overnight stay at Dumfries House, his country mansion in Scotland. The payments were intended for Charles’s charity ventures, but the email details how fixers would pocket up to 25 per cent of the fees.
Charles for sale: Prince’s charity orders a probe as it’s revealed fixers offered wealthy donors dinner with him and a stay at Dumfries House for £100,000
A major ethics investigation was last night launched into an extraordinary ‘cash for access’ scheme involving Prince Charles, which has been uncovered by The Mail on Sunday. A bombshell email reveals in excruciating detail how wealthy donors could pay £100,000 to secure a lavish dinner with the Prince of Wales and an overnight stay at Dumfries House, his country mansion in Scotland. The payments were intended for Charles’s charity ventures, but the email details how fixers would pocket up to 25 per cent of the fees.
MI5 and the BBC: Stamping the ‘Christmas Tree’ Files
If ever there was an example of ‘security’ factors being used as a pretext for political vetting, it is at the BBC. When their security procedures were revealed in 1985, the corporation said that vetting was restricted to a relatively small number of people who had access to ‘sensitive information’. But in reality a large number of BBC employees – ranging from Graduate Trainees and journalists to arts producers and drama directors – were vetted by MI5 via the Personnel Department.
Trump and the Oligarch
Trump had long experience benefitting from ill-gotten Russian largesse, selling luxury condos to many oligarchs and their minions. A decade earlier, Trump had bought a Palm Beach monstrosity called the Maison de l’Amitie, a 66,000-square-foot architectural nightmare built by a terrible-taste tycoon who moved to Florida from Massachusetts to become a philanthropist and socialite only to declare bankruptcy
THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH ABOUT THE OLIGARCHS
6.56 p.m., Wednesday 3 March 2004. A brand new white six-seater £1.5 million Agusta A109E helicopter lands under an overcast sky at Battersea heliport in south-west London. Waiting impatiently on the tarmac and clutching his two unregistered Vodafones is a broad-shouldered forty-five-year-old British lawyer named Stephen Curtis. He is not in the best of moods.
ARMS AND THE MAN
"Mark Thatcher was trying to cash in on the Al-Yamamah deal . . . In the arms business we met many people, royal hangers on. We called them ‘Black Princes’ and sometimes they had to be bought off . . . Thatcher was acting in the same way, as a kind of British Black Prince, but it was surely not the proper role for a British prime minister’s son"
BORIS JOHNSON’S FATHER AND THE MI6 CONNECTION
The MI6 career of Boris Johnson's father, Stanley, was short-lived but his memoirs did reveal one insight into the secret world that has long been believed - that MI6 officers were given legal immunity to commit crimes.
TRACING DIRTY MONEY
“Follow the money” was the whispered comment by Deep Throat in an underground car park to the Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward in 1973 during the Watergate investigation. Today this famous phrase remains as important as ever as billions of pounds are increasingly being stolen, laundered and hidden by dictators, oligarchs and fraudsters.
HOW TO COUNTER THE RUSSIAN THREAT
While she was Home Secretary Theresa May was briefed very discreetly by a senior former MI6 officer who had been stationed in Moscow during the turbulent 1990s when corruption and contract killing was rampant. The spy delivered a chilling message: Russian organised crime was active in the UK and London was a haven for Russian oligarchs to hide and protect their ill-gotten gains.
TRUMP AND THE OFFSHORE WORLD
When Hillary Clinton accused Donald Trump of being a serial tax dodger and not paying income tax for decades during the 2016 Presidential election campaign, he brazenly replied: “That makes me smart”. The former President openly brags about using aggressive tax avoidance schemes. “I fight like hell to pay as little as possible”, he said last year. And his then campaign manager Corey Lewandowski confirmed his boss’ approach to tax: “Every deduction possible – he fights for every single dollar”.
For more information, please visit: www.markhollingsworth.co.uk