Big TakeThe Royal Nephews at the Center of Monaco’s Latest Financial Scandal
On today’s Big Take podcast, an investigation by Bloomberg Businessweek reveals how Prince Albert II’s government regularly favored his nephews in business deals. Members of the royal family deny any wrongdoing, but Monaco finds itself in the midst of a political crisis.
Bloomberg reporters Gaspard Sebag and Anthony Cormier detail why two of the Prince’s nephews are now facing allegations of using state contracts to line their own pockets at a time when the country’s government is already under scrutiny for failing to curb financial crime.
Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news. For a lot of people, Monico brings to mind visions of wealth and seaside luxury.
When you think about Monica, you think quite quickly about the cincinating French riviera. You can picture yachts gliding on the Mediterranean.
That's my colleague Gaspar Sabag. He's based in Paris and focuses on investigations and court cases in France and Francophone countries.
And this Monica is lovely.
Is Anthony Cormier, a reporter on Bloomberg's investigations team.
Monico has this incredible reputation despite its very very small size, right. It has this elegant casino, It's got the very famous Grand Prix.
For the past year, Gaspar and Anthony have been paying a lot of attention to this glitzy, glamorous Mediterranean country. And that's because it's on the brink of crisis.
Monico is at the moment staring down the barrel of a gun. The country itself faces two looming reports by watchdogs in Europe about money laundering, about its inability to stop white collar crime, and about corruption inside the government.
The outcome of one of those reports could put the country on what's known as the graylest That's a classification reserved for a handful of states under increased monitoring for things like money laundering. That could make it much harder for the country to attract international business. And one ongoing drama involving Monico's high powered royal family could further tarnish the country's reputation.
And that's really broke peril to the Palace's door and is getting pretty sweaty, I would say.
Today on the show, a Bloomberg investigation into the business ventures of Monico's royal family and why two of the prince's nephews are now facing allegations of using their relationship with the palace to line their own pockets at a time when the country's government is already under scrutinyed for failing to curb financial crime. I'm your host, Sarah Holder, and this is the big take from Bloomberg News. Tucked between Italy and France, the tiny country of Monaco spans less than a square mile that's smaller than Central Park, and this wealthy enclave along the Mediterranean coast has been ruled by the same family line for the past seven hundred years.
Monaco is a very unique place because it is the last bastion of monarchy in Western Europe. It is the longest running dynasty in Europe, and as most of its neighbors in Europe shook off their rulers, their kings and queens in favor of democracy, Monico is still run by a royal family, a Prince, His Serene Highness Albert II of Monaco.
He basically is the government. There's a small parliament, but he can veto their decisions. He can set the foreign policy over there. I mean, he's really the go to person in Monaco.
Albert the second has been the reigning monarch since two thousand and five, and he has a close relationship with his nephews.
Andrea and Pierre cassi Rak. They're tall and blonde. They're the children of Albert's eldest sister, Princess Caroline. They grew up with enormous attention there, you know, the tabloids used to follow them around everywhere.
They got a lot of attention because of their charm, model like looks and sense of adventure. Andrea was on People Magazine's list of the world's most Beautiful people Pierre was part of the crew that helped Greta Tunberg sail to New York for a UN Climate summit. But their story is also in tragedy.
When Andrea and Pierre were just six and three years old, they lost their father. He was a bit of an adventurer. He loved speed, he raised powerboats, in fact, was a powerboat champion, and unfortunately, when they were young, he was in an offshore race. His powerboat flipped and Stefano passed. But before he died he'd set up a number of companies. One of them dealt with construction and another dealt with helicopters.
And by the time Andrea and Pierre had grown up, they decided to pick up where their father left off. In two thousand and nine, when the younger brother, Pierre, was just twenty one years old, he announced that he had become the majority shareholder of his father's construction company, and.
That very same year the company starts working on major state contracts.
One of their first big jobs was to build the new Yacht Club of Monaco, and Gaspar says, you'd be hard pressed to find a higher profile public works project.
It's right on the main poll He got the big yachts coming in, people are meeting, you set up business meetings there. You know, it's really quite a unique place.
It's the center of Monaco's CNBC culture. Yes, absolutely, For two young men looking to break into real estate, it was an extraordinary opportunity.
Ps twenty one years old and Rest twenty five years old, and all of a sudden, here they are building one of the most iconic buildings in.
Monaco, with Andrea and Pierre at the helm. Their construction company would go on to win more state contracts, a botanical center, apartments for the elderly, the rebuilding of Parliament. In fact, the company's website says it's been a part of the most important public projects in the principality of Monaco, and all those contracts go through their uncle's government.
Imagine the British royal family. Imagine a member, Imagine a nephew of King Charles bidding on a state contract. What would people say. I think there would be a massive outcry, But in Monaco, you know, the volume is muted often because the locals they have too much at stake to cause a fuss.
After the break, Gaspar and Anthony's investigation reveals just how close the relationship between the Kasaragi success and their uncle's government may have been, and why that is causing a fuss. We're back after picking up the mantle of their late father's construction company. Andrea and Pierre Kasaragi, nephews to Monaco's ruler, Prince Albert. The Ion have had a lot of success securing state contracts, but their ambitions didn't stop with construction. In the last decade, the nephews have looked to the sky.
There are only two places in the world that regularly schedule helicopter flights to and from. One is meant to JFK. The other is Monaco to the local airport in Nice. It's a really picturesque way to get in and out of the principality. You fly over the rocks and you see the yachts and it's a really gorgeous seven minute flight.
Andrea and Pierre's father founded a helicopter company called Monacare back in the eighties, but it had largely gone dormant after his death.
It was picked up by the palace itself to shuttle the royal family around, but when they got a bit older, Andrea and Pierre decided that they want to re enter the helicopter business.
They rounded up some investors and started operating a service for VIP members and the Principality, and eventually they set their sites on the exclusive Nice Airport to Monaco route.
But that route had for many many years been controlled by two local brothers. They were surprised to learn that the Principality was taking away their contract and opening up for competition.
The Principality put out a call for proposals from different helicopter operators and in the end, Andrea and Pierre's company won the contract, and the losing brothers were shocked.
They don't understand what's happened to them. They don't in fact understand why the contract was taken away in the first place. They felt like they had a legitimate.
Bid, and Anthony says they only got more confused when the Palace sent over the royal family's accountant, a man by the name of Claude Palmerow to smooth things over.
Prince Albert sends his long time and most trusted advisor to make a financial settlement with the company that lost the bid, which the company rejected and in fact they filed the criminal complaint.
The complaint led to a criminal inquiry, which is handled by an investigative judge from France. With fewer than ten thousand nationals, Monaco doesn't have enough citizens to staff its own courts and has a long standing agreement to share civil servants with France. The prince himself is immune from all criminal charges and civil complaints, but his nephews and other entities in Monaco don't have the same protections, and the judge ordered police to search the headquarters of their helicopter company and the offices of Monaco's civil aviation and IT departments. So once the police start looking into the nephew's helicopter company and this deal, what do they find.
One of the first things that the authorities find is a series of notes that are kept in the draft folder of an executive's Gmail account, and these documents seemed to show that the company was working with or speaking with the government, long before it was known that the contract was even up.
In other words, the documents seemed to show a secret back channel between the palace and the nephew's helicopter company that gave them detailed parameters of what it would take to win the contract, and as far as Anthony and Gaspard could find, the.
Rivals didn't have these parameters. They were on the back foot. And what happened was is that Andrea and Pierre's company was able to tame new helicopters much earlier than their rivals could. That was one of the deciding factors the tip things in favor of the Kaisiraki's company. It was an enormous find for the investigators because they were able to approach the executives and say, frankly, what is this, How do you explain this? The executive said that these were his personal reflections. The government says we didn't give them any parameters at all, But to the investigators it's become a pretty critical piece of evidence in their inquiry.
So what do the nephews have to say about all this.
Well, they have told us in a statement that they've done nothing wrong, that they abide by all of the public rules and fair competition rules in Monaco. So they from their perspective, they've done nothing wrong. In this criminal investigation isn't going to affect them in any way.
But the nephews aren't the only ones bringing scrutiny to the palace door. There's another person close to the family who could spell trouble for the Monagaesque royalty, a person who was trusted to handle their discreete affairs. The same guy who was sent to the losing helicopter company to try to smooth things over. The palace accountant we mentioned earlier, Claude Palmyraw.
For many years, you know he boy boy. He would do everything from store some of their wealth hidden in Panama. It would balance the accounts of Prince Albert's wife. He was the administrator who signed the paperwork on secret apartments for the royal family. He was basically, you know, their lieutenant for lack of a better word.
In twenty twenty one, a lot of dirty laundry was laid out for the world to see when Palmero's emails, along with those of other Monagesque officials, were hacked.
Those documents were leaked on the Internet. They were called the Stossier du Roche the Dossiers of the Rock.
These emails the leak purported to show him trying to favor some developers over others, basically, you know, abusing in a way his position behind the scenes. He obviously denies it.
This week was explosive, and as pressure from the fallout mounted in the years that followed, Prince Albert the Second reassessed his relationship with his once trusted advisor.
In May twenty twenty three, you could sense that Albert was changing his mind about Palmarrow, and just a month later he had palace guards escored him out of his office and out of the palace, and he's now basically at war with his old employer. Palmarow and Prince Albert have started to litigate and it's quite an incredibly tense moment there. Also due to this, I can only describe it as a divorce.
Basically.
You know, you've got the Prince who is saying in a criminal complaint that supplored Palmrrow mismanaged his accounts. You've got palm Merrow trying to bring basically Prince Albert to justice. He's suing him him at the European Code of the Human Rights to contest his dismissal, and he's even ladged a criminal complaint against the Prince. It's really nasty.
So all of this stuff is swirling around Prince Albert. At the same time, you've got international watchdogs who want to make sure that it's not a backdoor to financial crooks. You've got another separate set of inspectors looking at the palace. You've got your longtime advisor who's on the outs and you're having investigated, and who is suing you. It's the latest scandal for Albert, who's been on the throne for nearly twenty years now, and when he took over, he promised to clean up Monaco's reputation. The French riviera in Monica in particular has long been known as a sunny place for shady people. Well, Albert promised to reform that. In fact, he hasn't. His reign has been tarred by one scandal after another. The investigation of his nephews is only the most recent one. The outside look by inspectors adds enormous pressure on Prince Albert himself and his government to finally, perhaps reform its ways.
This has been the big take from Bloomberg News. I'm Sarah Holder. This episode was produced by David Fox, who was edited by Aaron Edwards. It was mixed by Ben O'Brien. It was fact checked by David Fox. Our senior producers are Naomi Shaven and Jill Duddy Carley. We get editorial direction from Elizabeth Ponso, Nicole beemsterbor is our executive producer. Sage Bauman is Bloomberg's head of podcasts. Thanks for listening. Please follow and review The Big Take wherever you listen to podcasts. It helps new listeners find the show. We'll be back tomorrow
