Controversial ex-valet Fawcett is paid £276k by Charles’s charities
PRINCE Charles may be stepping back from some of his charitable work as he approaches 70, but he continues to take good care of his controversial former valet, Michael Fawcett.
I can reveal that Fawcett (below) — who proved so indispensable to Charles that he is said to have squeezed the royal toothpaste on to HRH’s brush — enjoyed just over £276,000 flowing in to his company from the Prince’s charities.
The Dumfries House Trust, which runs the Scottish stately home Charles ‘saved for the nation’ in 2007, paid Fawcett’s business, Premier Mode Limited, £ 276,158 in the financial year ending last March.
Newly published accounts disclose that the heir to the throne used £90,000 from his Prince of Wales Charitable Foundation to cover the cost of Fawcett’s £85,000-per-year salary as executive director of Dumfries House.
Charles uses the 18th- century Palladian pile in Ayrshire to wine and dine wealthy donors to his numerous charities.
As well as Fawcett’s generous salary, Dumfries paid his company £72,000 for ‘consultancy services’ and £119,158 for ‘event delivery’.
Cash was even found for Fawcett’s son Oliver — his firm was paid £ 1,770 for producing a short film ‘ covering live build events on the [Dumfries] estate during the year’. Last year, a courtier told me: ‘Michael is probably the most influential person in the Prince’s life — and that includes the Duchess of Cornwall.’
At the time, Fawcett had just been appointed as a director of Charles’s company, A. G. Carrick Ltd, which the Prince set up to sell goods at his Highgrove shops.
This newspaper revealed in 2016 that businessmen had been asked to pay up to £100,000 each to be entertained by Charles at an event in aid of Dumfries House.
The Prince’s office said the letter sent to donors demanding cash to attend one of Charles’s charity functions had been ‘erroneously’ sent out by a ‘third party’ without their knowledge and steps were immediately taken to ensure that it never happened again.
Fawcett, now 55, resigned not once but twice from the Royal Household. In 1998, when a number of the Prince’s staff complained to Charles of Fawcett’s bullying attitude, he duly resigned.
But within a week, he was not only reinstated, but promoted. Then, in 2003, he was forced out as a senior valet when an inquiry found he had sold off gifts on Charles’s orders. However, he was retained as a highly paid ‘consultant’. A spokesman for Dumfries House Trust said that a ‘ significant portion’ of the payments went to ‘third-party suppliers of services, such as catering and equipment hire, rather than to any one individual’.