Prince Charles’ chum Fawcett makes business a family affair
As the Prince of Wales’s former senior valet, Michael Fawcett reputedly squeezed the royal toothpaste on to hRh’s brush. And now, he’s the £95,000-ayear chief executive of a key part of the Prince’s charitable endeavours, the Prince’s Foundation.
Arguably the most controversial man in Prince Charles’s life, Fawcett is surely also the most commercially sophisticated — and ambitious.
that is the inescapable conclusion from developments at the catering company, Premier Mode Ltd, which Fawcett — who twice resigned from service in the Royal household — co-founded with his wife, Debbie, 56, a former Palace housemaid, in 2006.
I can disclose that 55-year-old Fawcett has appointed his son, Oliver, 22, and daughter, emily, 24, as directors of the company.
simultaneously, Fawcett and Debbie — Premier’s only other directors — have altered the company’s share structure into 100 A, B, C and D ordinary shares, suggesting that the four members of the family are now also its sole shareholders.
If so, it may offer evidence that Fawcett is intent on sparing his offspring the indignity he suffered as a Buckingham Palace footman, when he supplemented his income with a saturday job in a menswear shop.
Additionally, Fawcett and Debbie have instituted an intriguing and entirely legitimate change to the company accounts submitted to Companies house. After ten consecutive years of Premier filing what are known as ‘total exemption small company accounts’, generally comprising seven or eight pages, this year, they’ve opted for ‘microcompany accounts’, which records only the company balance sheet on October 31, 2017, when Premier’s assets totalled £12,495.
Coincidentally, this was the same financial year in which, as I disclosed six months ago, the firm received £276,158 from its most valuable client, the Dumfries house trust, the charity established to run Charles’s Palladian pile in Ayrshire. earlier this year, the trust was subsumed into the Prince’s Foundation.
the figure included Fawcett’s then £85,000-per-year salary as executive director of Dumfries house, £72,000 for Premier’s ‘consultancy services’ and £119,158 for ‘event delivery’. that money seems to have been dispersed among the directors.
Charity does begin at home — a dictum surely drummed into Fawcett by his father, a company cashier from Bexley, south-east London.