Buckingham Palace was sent a dossier of 30,000 emails six years ago that may have contained evidence that Andrew-Mountbatten Windsor passed confidential government information to a banker friend, court documents have revealed.
An internal government briefing note on the financial crisis in Iceland is believed to have been contained in the emails, which cover a period when Mountbatten-Windsor was working as a trade envoy. Mountbatten-Windsor is reported to have passed the note to the banker associate.
The dossier was sent to the Lord Chamberlain, the most senior officer of the royal household, in May 2020, according to information in high court rulings reported by the BBC.
Mountbatten-Windsor was arrested in February on suspicion of misconduct in public office after files released by the US Department of Justice involving Jeffrey Epstein appeared to show him sharing confidential trade information with the financier. Mountbatten-Windsor has consistently denied any wrongdoing.
The documents sent to Buckingham Palace in 2020 were taken from a separate source – a personal email account belonging to Jonathan Rowland, former chief executive of Banque Havilland, a Luxembourg-based private bank. They were said to have been obtained illegitimately by one of Rowland’s business associates in 2013.
The Telegraph reported in February that in 2010 Mountbatten-Windsor had tasked one of his senior aides with obtaining a briefing note from the Treasury about the financial crisis in Iceland. Mountbatten-Windsor then sent the briefing note to Rowland. There is no suggestion that Rowland acted improperly.
“I pass this on to you for comment and a suggestion or solution?” Mountbatten-Windsor wrote to Rowland. “Interested in your opinion?”
Rowland had financial links to Iceland and Banque Havillant was formed out of the defunct Luxembourg branch of the collapsed Icelandic bank Kaupthing.
This correspondence is reported to have been contained in the cache of emails sent to the royal household. Thames Valley Police is believed to have sought to obtain these files for its investigation into Mountbatten-Windsor.
The force’s investigation is now ready to examine any claims of sexual misconduct and earlier this month it appealed for potential witnesses to come forward. Police had been reported to be struggling to bring a case to prosecution against Mountbatten-Windsor for misconduct in public office.
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Photograph by Alamy