Andrew was paid millions for mansion by oligarch linked to bribery scheme

A BBC inquiry revealed that Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor received millions of pounds from an oligarch who was implicated in criminal activity. Timur Kulibayev, a Kazakh billionaire, told the BBC via his lawyers that he obtained a loan from Enviro Pacific Investments to help him buy Andrew's exile. Prosecutors in Italy announced that the company earned money from a bribery scheme in 2007. The oligarch purchased Sunninghill Park in Berkshire from the then prince for £15 million, with the help of Enviro Pacific funds.

Kulibayev is the son-in-law of Kazakhstan's deputy prime minister and one of the country's oil and gas industry's most influential figures. The BBC has also learned that an Italian businessman pleaded guilty to bribing the oligarch. Kulibayev's lawyers informed us that he never participated in bribes or corruption, and that the funds used to buy Sunninghill Park were entirely legitimate. The revelations have raised concerns over whether the then-prince profited from the proceeds of crime inadvertently, and whether his counsels conducted the required checks by law to prevent this. The agreement had blatant red flags, according to Tom Keatinge, head of the Centre for Finance and Security, and it should have required stringent checks to see that it was not

assisting in the laundering of illicit proceeds of crime. Kulibayev was reportedly paid £3 million more than the asking price, but it was still an estimated £7 million more expensive than the property's market value. The former emper did not respond to the BBC's calls for comment. After a skepticism of the offer, he told the Daily Telegraph in 2009:

It's not my company" is the subject of concern; the second half is paid. If that is the case, I'm not going to go out of my mouth and say they have overpaid me.

On the market

In 1986, the Queen gave Andrew Sunninghill Park as a wedding gift. The 12-bedroom house, with 12 matching bathrooms and six reception rooms, was mocked for its resemblance to a Tesco superstore. Andrew became personally invested when it first came on the market in 2001 and refused to attract offers. According to Simon Wilson, deputy ambassador at the time, the former prince used the opportunity of a formal visit to Bahrain as the UK's trade ambassador in 2003 to personally try to sell the property to Gulf royals. However, a buyer did eventually emerge from the then prince's links to a different world: Kazakhstan. Andrew became patron of the British-Kazakh Society in 2002, together with the country's autocratic president Nursultan Nazarbayev. Andrew visited the country in 2006 and Nazarbayev met the then Queen at Buckingham Palace later this year. Timur Kulibayev, Nazarbayev's son-in-law, made the bid for Sunninghill Park in At the time, he had a fortune estimated at more than £1 billion and played a vital role in the country's sovereign wealth fund, Samruk-Kaznya, which controls a substantial portion of the state's oil and gas industry. Andrew was reportedly introduced to Kulibayev by Kazakh businesswoman and socialite Goga Ashkenazi, who has two children from an affair with the oligarch. She later described the prince as a close friend, but now claims she hasn't had any dealings with him for about 15 years. In June 2007, Andrew and Ashkenazi were photographed alongside the Queen on Ladies Day in Ascot. Contracts for the acquisition of Sunninghill were swapped in the same month. Kulibayev bought the mansion from Unity Assets Corporation, which he owned. Farrer & Co, the Royal Family's solicitors, represented the seller. In September of this year, the deal was closed. The former prince's chartered flight to Kazakhstan on official business as the trade envoy was paid £57,000 in the same month, according to royal records. The UK government was worried about Kazakhstan at the time of the auction. Allegiances of systemic graft in the region, according to Neoff Hoon, the European Minister of Education, were "rife. Despite these questions, as well as Andrew's official position as trade envoy and his subsequent role as fourth-in-line to the throne, the buyer's identity was not revealed by either of the parties or by Buckingham Palace. Kulibayev was only required to identify the owners of offshore businesses that purchased UK assets in 2007, but there was no obligation to disclose the names of offshore companies that purchased US assets in 2007.

Links to corruption

When media reports said that Italian prosecutors were probing Kulibayev allegations, questions were raised regarding the transaction's links to graft in 2012. The allegations included the possibility that bribes may have been used to finance the acquisition of Sunninghill Park by Enviro Pacific Investments, which has since been confirmed as part financing the venture. These probes did not result in any charges against Kulibayev. Nonetheless, the BBC has seen evidence from a string of court suits in 2016 and 2017, which together show how Italian prosecutors concluded that Enviro Pacific Investments had earned funds from bribery schemes. These documents were first obtained by L'Espresso magazine as part of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists'Caspian Cabals project. Enviro Pacific Investments' link to graft was discovered by another firm named Aventall, according to them. Agostino Bianchi, an Italian oil executive, pleaded guilty to paying bribes to Kulibayev and other Kazakh officials for lucrative oil contracts, and Aventall was one of the companies used to channel bribers in a case in Monza, and one Kulibayev was not charged. Aventall was operated by Massimo Guidotti, who was described as the mediator of corruption in Bianchi's plea deal. According to court records in a related case, he had developed a rating system that measured the influence of Kazakh oligarchs. Kulibayev received the highest five stars in an email from 2009. Questioned by prosecutors, Guidotti denied distributing bribes. Prosecutors in a second case in Milan found that Aventall had made payments of an allegedly corrupt character to Enviro Pacific Investments, the company that borrowed the funds for the Sunninghill purchase. They said $6. 5m (£3. (27 million) had been promised but they couldn't find any evidence of $1. 5m (£755,000) of payments. The last was in April 2007, less than two months before Sunninghill contracts were swapped for Sunningmill. Enviro Pacific was linked to Kulibayev, according to the prosecutors, who said open sources showed that the Envir However, the Milan cases were dismissed in January 2017 in part because prosecutors were unable to tie the payments to specific jobs or specifically identify the public officials who received the funds. Kulibayev's attorneys told the BBC that he denied being bribed, had no involvement in awarding the jobs, and that no probe has been opened in Italy. Kulibayev's was not interested in and had no idea of anycorrupt schemeinvolving Mr Bianchi or Mr Guidotti, they said. He never owned or controlled Enviro Pacific, and that the firm never held assets on his behalf, according to his lawyers. When asked who owned it, they did not respond, citing secrecy. However, the oligarch's attorneys told the BBC that their client

obtained a loan from Enviro Pacific in 2007 for commercial reasons and on pure commercial terms at a market rate

to finance the acquisition of Sunninghill Park. It means that a firm that was suspected of complicity was also involved in the agreement with Andrew. The oligarch's lawyers did not deny the loan's estimated £6 million value, but Kulibayev's later paid it, with curiosity. The funds used to purchase Sunninghill were entirely legitimate, according to the company, and that all proper due diligence would have been carried out at the time. Kulibayev's lawyers said he paid £15 million to guarantee he was successful in buying the house as there was no one competing bidder.

Red flags

Sunninghill lay idle for years after Kulibayev's purchase but was eventually demolished in 2016. In its place, a new, 14-bedroom mansion was eventually built, but it has never been used. There is no evidence that the former king knew the source of funds used by Kulibayev to pay Sunninghill. However, there were other aspects of the auction or red flags that may have sparked the concern among lawyers working for Andrew that at least some of the funds could have arisened from misappropriation.

Anyone acting for you in any property deal should be alert to the risks inherent in offshore investments in UK property, both legal and financial,

Keatinge, the money laundering specialist at the Centre for Finance and Security. Since 2004, lawyers have been mandated to perform stringent checks on the source of funds, including identifying the owner of offshore companies purchasing property. Margaret Hodge, the government's anti-corruption champion, said she was completely shocked by the BBC's revelations, and that proceeds of crime may have been involved in what has already been a tumultuous salesThese allegations must be thoroughly investigated by both Parliament and the appropriate national authorities. Nobody is above the law. " Buckingham Palace refused to comment, as did the former emperor. Farrer & Co. , the Royal Family's solicitors, declined to comment, citing client confidentiality. All mandatory checks were carried out at the time, according to the buyer's solicitor, and the firm knew Kulibayev was the person buying the property. Since Nazarbayev resigned as president in 2019, Kazakhstan's new government has begun a legal action in Switzerland to try to recover millions from individuals and businesses that have been accused of misconduct. Kulibayev is suspected of being complicit in the bribery scheme in Italy, but the oligarch is not one of the defendants. Kulibayev, according to early 2025, was in talks to pay the Kazakhstan government $1 billion (£741 million) in connection with an inquiry into his father-in-law's inheritance during his father's tenure. The oligarch's lawyers insist that his wealth was accumulated through decades of company practice, that he is not under scrutiny, and that any suggestion that negotiating to pay compensation for unlawfully acquired assets is inaccurate.