Prince Andrew: Pitch@Palace bosses give Duke of York ultimatum to quit project
The Duke of York’s flagship project is being shut down in the UK while directors of its overseas arm have indicated they will quit if he does not relinquish control.
Pitch@Palace CIC, which is based in Buckingham Palace, is being wound up after trustees concluded it had no future in the wake of the Jeffrey Epstein scandal.
But the Duke is refusing to give up its sister company Pitch@Palace Global, prompting three of its directors to offer their resignations.
While Pitch@Palace CIC is a non-profit-making company and is controlled by the Prince Andrew Charitable Trust, the overseas arm Pitch@Palace Global is owned by the Duke himself and was set up to make profits by brokering deals between tech start-ups and wealthy investors.
Three of the remaining five directors of Pitch@Palace Global, a Dragons’ Den-style corporate project, have told the Duke that its future is untenable while it retains an association with him. The imminent departures of Martin Dunnett, a private equity executive, Alex Johnston, an app developer and investor and Martin Harriman, a telecoms entrepreneur, would leave only two directors at the helm: Amanda Thirsk, the Duke’s private secretary, and Johan Eliasch, a sports tycoon and close friend.
The Duke was photographed on a yacht surrounded by topless women in Thailand in 2001 on a holiday with Mr Eliasch.
A well-placed source said: “Pitch@Palace CIC will be wound down. The company belongs to the Prince Andrew Charitable Trust and the trustees met and decided to close it down. Pitch Global is going to carry on but because of the massive changes that have happened, three of the existing directors felt there was a need for a strategic review and they decided to step aside by resigning.”
The turmoil at Pitch was prompted by a catastrophic Newsnight interview in which the Duke failed to express regret over his friendship with Epstein.
The companies had also raised concerns that the Duke was mixing his charitable work with his business interests. Auditors advised the Duke and his team that Pitch@Palace Global, established to earn money from tech investments abroad, was too closely linked to Pitch@Palace CIC.
As a result, directors – who sat on both boards – were ordered to choose one or the other, resulting in a stream of resignations from each in early November. The Daily Telegraph can reveal that the directors urged the Duke to step away from the project, which he founded in 2014. They initially assumed he would go but the Duke has clung on to the initiative.
A second source said: “There has been an awful lot of navel gazing over the last few weeks. We’ve held several meetings and have been waiting for the Duke to make his decision but it’s become increasingly clear that he does not want to go.” The source acknowledged that it was an “extremely difficult” decision for the Duke to make, given the broader fallout over the Epstein scandal.
They said they were “incredibly proud” of everything Pitch@Palace had achieved and the almost 1,000 start-ups it had created over the last six years.
