Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor set to close one of his last remaining businesses next week
Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor will enter a new phase in his withdrawal from public life as one of his last companies closes.
The disgraced royal’s start-up Pitch@Palace will be delisted from Companies House on Tuesday (February 3), less than a decade after the former Duke of York founded it in 2017.
In October, Buckingham Palace announced that Andrew would be stripped of his royal titles amid ongoing controversy over his friendship with late pedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein.
While the Dragons’ Den-inspired Pitch@Palace business managed to recover from the initial downturn in 2019, its UK branch closed in 2021 and is now defunct.
The program had initially won Andrew praise for helping young people break into business, as it encouraged entrepreneurs to pitch their ideas to potential investors and compete for funding.
In a document signed by the firm’s sole director Arthur Lancaster and submitted to Companies House, the company applied for “redundancy and dissolution”.
Companies House lists Prince Andrew, of Royal Lodge at Windsor, as having “significant influence or control” over the business.
Andrew resigned from his role at Pitch@Palace in 2019 following the backlash following his interview with the BBC. news night program where he was questioned about his ties to Epstein. The former duke vehemently denied any wrongdoing.
The latest accounts showed cash was £10,965 at the end of March, down from £220,990 the year before.
The business was dragged into controversy last year when allegations emerged that Pitch@Palace China’s co-founder was a spy. Yang Tengbo, said to be a close confidant of Andrew, has been banned from entering the UK by the Home Office.
While Andrew stepped down from royal duties in 2019 following his disastrous Newsnight interview, the posthumous publication of Virgina Giuffre’s memoirs and the US government’s release of documents from Epstein’s estate brought greater scrutiny to his relationship with the financier.
The king took action by stripping his younger brother of his birthright as a prince and his dukedom due to “serious errors of judgement”.
She is set to move from the Royal Lodge in Windsor Great Park to the King’s private Sandringham estate this year, after it was revealed she had been paying only peppercorn rent for more than two decades.
The former prince has been facing allegations of sexual harassment for many years after Ms Giuffre was trafficked by Epstein, allegations Andrew has repeatedly denied.
It was also revealed before Christmas, three months after she claimed she had cut off all contact with the convicted pedophile when she emailed Epstein in 2011 and said “we are in this together”.
He paid Ms. Giuffre, a woman he claimed he had never met, millions to settle a civil sexual assault claim in 2022.
