The saga of Andrew Mountbatten Windsor, the retired Royal Navy officer formerly known as Prince, already features political intrigue, Chinese espionage and questionable funding from exotic sources.
It was perhaps inevitable that cryptocurrency would find its way into the story.
It concerns a failed mining venture, a royal brand ambassador and, naturally, a private tour of Buckingham Palace.
Royal endorsements
Sarah Ferguson, the Duke’s ex-wife, divorced him in 1996 but continued to share a home. In 2018, she met Jay Bloom, an American businessman, and became a brand ambassador for his firm, Pegasus Group Holdings. The company promised to harness solar power from the Arizona desert to power cryptocurrency mining.
In 2019, Mr Mountbatten Windsor arranged a Buckingham Palace tour for Mr Bloom and his associate, Michael Evers. Mr Evers claimed they met the late Queen; Mr Bloom denied it. The group later dined at the nearby St James’s Palace with Andrew and Sarah.
Money trails
According to the BBC, Ms Ferguson received £200,000 (around $260,000) and was promised a potential £1.2mn bonus. The payments soon became entangled in murkier dealings. Other reports suggest she was paid £225,000 by Selman Turk, who was in turn meant to be reimbursed by Pegasus.
Mr Turk, who had separately paid £1mn to Andrew, was later convicted of multi-million-pound embezzlement.
Failure
Pegasus’s mining operation never lived up to its celestial name. Of the planned 16,000 generators, only 615 were installed, producing a mere $33,779 worth of cryptocurrency. In 2021, a tribunal awarded investors $4.1mn in damages, though Mr Bloom is appealing that finding.
The episode reveals little about the future of digital assets but quite a lot about those drawn into their orbit. In the uneasy overlap of royalty and crypto, both reputation and return have proved distinctly volatile.
