Andrew fixed palace visit for firm with £1.4m deal with ex-wife

1 hour ago Share Save Billy Kenber, politics investigations correspondent and Phil Kemp, political reporter Share Save

Getty Images Andrew met the owners of a crypto-mining firm which worked with Sarah Ferguson at Buckingham Palace

Andrew Mountbatten Windsor arranged a private tour of Buckingham Palace while the late Queen was in residence, for businessmen from a cryptocurrency mining firm which agreed to pay his ex-wife up to £1.4m, the BBC can reveal. Jay Bloom and his colleague Michael Evers were driven through the palace gates in the former prince's own car after being collected from their five-star Knightsbridge hotel for the visit in June 2019. Their company, Pegasus Group Holdings, which Mr Bloom co-founded, employed Sarah Ferguson as a "brand ambassador" for a crypto-mining scheme which would lose investors millions when it failed less than a year later. Mr Bloom, an entrepreneur who had previously set up a failed Mafia-themed museum in Las Vegas, and Mr Evers, a former actor, were met by a greeter and escorted inside the palace.

Mr Evers told the BBC they then met the Queen, although Mr Bloom disputed this. Both Mr Evers and Mr Bloom were invited by the then-prince to his Pitch@Palace event - a Dragons' Den-style business pitching competition - at nearby St James's Palace later that day, and they dined that evening with Andrew, Ms Ferguson and their daughter Princess Beatrice. Ms Ferguson was working with Pegasus Group Holdings at the time of the palace visit, while she was Duchess of York, to promote plans to use thousands of solar power generators to mine Bitcoin at a remote site in the Arizona desert. But the project ultimately failed with only 615 of the planned 16,000 generators acquired and just $33,779 (about £25,000)