THE BRIEFING

PRINCE Andrew was secretly monitored by British fraud detectives investigating the collapse of a corrupt Icelandic bank, The Upsetter can reveal.

The former Duke of York was UK trade envoy when the Serious Fraud Office [SFO] compiled intelligence reports over concerns about his links to a billionaire Tory donor planning to rescue Kaupthing Bank, which had collapsed in 2008.

David Rowland was a friend and financial advisor to Andrew whose help he enlisted to promote a new private bank for the super rich he created in 2009 out of the ashes of the collapsed one.

Mick Randall, the former lead investigator on the SFO’s case, has told this newsletter:

“We were logging intelligence on Prince Andrew. We were on him. Intelligence reports were going into the SFO system on his activities in Luxembourg with the Rowlands.”

Neither Andrew or Rowland were under criminal invesitgation by the SFO, but the use of his envoy role to promote his friend’s new business, renamed Banque Havilland, troubled the lead investigator.

“We thought it was a bit strange and grubby.”

Now Andrew’s trade envoy role is at the centre of a Thames Valley Police investigation into alleged misconduct in public office after revelations in the Epstein files and emails from inside Banque Havilland.

Among the allegations are that in 2010 Andrew asked for a Treasury briefing on the collapsed bank’s deposits and passed it to Rowland’s son, Jonathan, the then chief executive of Havilland.

Randall believes the briefing was based on a highly sensitive presentation he had days earlier been asked to give Treasury officials about his joint investigation with Iceland’s special prosecutor.

The SFO operation put Kaupthing bank executives and major borrowers under surveillance, including the use of extensive phones taps.

The intelligence logs on Andrew could be highly relevant to the Thames Valley inquiry, who recently made a public appeal for information.

Randall is speaking out because the force has ignored his offer to brief them. “Nothing surprises me about the police anymore,” said the retired detective with over 30 years experience investigating organised crime.

Readers of this newsletter will know him from his whistleblowing over an unsolved double murder in Epping Forest in 1989 linked to London’s top gangsters.

Subscribers can listen to The Upsetter talking to Randall about his SFO investigation. He is one of the few former police officers to come forward on Andrew related matters.

Here’s what Thames Valley cops should know if they are serious about investigating Andrew, having gone to the trouble of arresting him so publicly a few months back, which left him looking like this …