The creditors spitting mad that Fergie’s moving to a tax haven
Money is very important to the Duke and Duchess of york. She always needs it, and he is said to be obsessed by it. At least with Fergie we know where it comes from when she makes it. With Andrew, there remains a nagging unease about his ten years as Britain’s globe-trotting trade ambassador, when the line between his official schmoozing on the nation’s behalf and private networking among the ultra-rich on his own behalf became rather blurred.
In January, he and Fergie, who divorced 19 years ago, jointly put their names to the title deeds of a £13 million chalet in that most chi-chi of Swiss ski resorts, Verbier.
Intriguingly, while Andrew has been paying the ‘ sizeable but manageable’ mortgage on the seven-bed Chalet Helora (indoor pool, sauna, etc), it emerged this week that Fergie has now moved in.
So has some of her own furniture, which had been in storage while she was living for nearly nine years under Andrew’s roof i n Royal Lodge, the Queen Mother’s old house in Windsor Great Park.
The wooden Chalet Helora is now her ‘main’ home. She lives there.
‘She will have her independence, her own identity, now that she has her own home,’ says her spokesman. ‘She can put down roots, which was impossible at Royal Lodge.’
But is that all there is to it? Have she and Andrew really ‘consciously uncoupled’ after all these years of unmarried togetherness?
Has her ‘close friendship’ with handsome businessman Manuel Fernandez (at 47, eight years her junior) played any part in her decision to up sticks? If her move to Switzerland is intriguing, it’s even more surprising that Fergie (who, at 55, is more of a global roamer than ever) is putting down roots in a town that is a laborious two-hour drive from the nearest international airport, Geneva.
After all, she could have put down roots in London, where she has a charming, rented flat in that most prestigious of addresses, eaton Square, in the heart of Belgravia. What’s more, she will continue to have her own room at Andrew’s Royal Lodge.
So what lies behind it? one clue comes f rom a close business associate. The Duchess, he says,
‘Fergie could make a great deal of money’ ‘It just makes me angry,’ says one owed thousands
‘has the potential to make a great deal of money’.
Which leads us, of course, directly to the temptingly generous tax laws of which wily Switzerland al l ows t he monied to t ake advantage if they choose to base themselves in the country. one possibility is that Fergie will exploit the ‘lump sum’ perk.
Wealthy foreign residents pay an amount based on their family’s annual expenditure or cost of living (essentially, what they would pay in rent to live in their home), rather than standard income tax — as long as they don’t earn any income in Switzerland.
each individual negotiates their own deal with the l ocal tax authorities — and, significantly, income earned elsewhere does not have to be reported.
even if she pays income tax, the top rate in her local area of Valais is 34.97 per cent, compared with the top rate of 45 per cent in the UK.
The Duchess of york has never lost her enthusiasm for making money. Indeed, we learn that she even has a shared interest in a ‘let’ property with a good friend in Verbier (where renting a ski chalet can cost £22,000 a week) and some of her furniture may well be used in it.
The ‘ rebranding’ of Fergie, four years after the collapse of her U.S.based lifestyle company, Hartmoor, was kicked off with her 55th birthday party at Windsor Castle last autumn. (Andrew requested the Queen’s permission to use her favourite residence while she was away.)
Since then, money has started to roll into Fergie’s coffers again, though not yet, it must be said, on the scale it did when she was ‘hot’ in America and earned £2 million a year — much of it as international ambassador for Weight-Watchers.
But as one of her old friends says: ‘Sarah’s always the optimist, and believes things are happening.’ It was at that Windsor Castle party that a revitalised Fergie was on display, 55lb lighter thanks — as she has been endlessly telling American television audiences on a shopping channel — to the Fusion Xcelerator, a £65 food blender.
Since then she’s been paid ‘a sixfigure sum’ by mail-order company Tristar Products to market it, as well as hair- styling tongs, under the name Duchess Discoveries. (A fellow ‘celebrity’ used by Tristar to sell its products is the former wrestler Hulk Hogan.)
Meanwhile, new products for Duchess Discoveries are understood to be in the pipeline.
earlier this year, the Duchess also brought out her own range of teas and is developing other ‘ international commitments’. She’s been writing children’s books again ( remember Budgie The Little Helicopter?), and her latest, which should soon be on its way to the publishers, is called Fergie’s Farm.
But as the Duchess settles into her £13 million main home, not everyone is sharing in her joy. Her one-time creditors, who received settlements of just 25p in the pound over four years ago after she ran up debts of £5 million, are unlikely to be sending her housewarming gifts.
For them, the latest resurrection of the Duchess of york, who has twice come close to bankruptcy, and the comforts she will enjoy at Chalet Helora, are a constant source of exasperation.
one question that has been exercising them is how much, if anything, the Duchess herself put into the chalet purchase.
‘It just makes me very angry that she sails on and up,’ says one to whom she owed many thousands. As usual, Andrew took charge of clearing his ex-wife’s debts and put in £1.5 million of his own money to help her avoid bankruptcy in 2011.
Another helpful £15,000, used to pay off one particular creditor, came from his friend Jeffrey epstein, the billionaire paedophile.
epstein’s one- time girlfriend Virginia Roberts filed a legal claim in America early this year claiming that she was under-age when the Prince had sex with her — a claim that he implacably denied and which she subsequently dropped.
Another of Andrew’s friends to rally round at the time was controversial tycoon and former tax exile David Rowland, whose aggressive business tactics cost him the post of treasurer of the Tory Party. Rowland, whom Andrew brought
to tea with the Queen at Balmoral, put up £ 40,000 of the £ 75,000 that t he Duchess owed K ate Waddington, her former friend and public relations consultant.
How different it all is now for Fergie as she prepares, it seems, to settle into Verbier, the wealthy resort where increasing numbers of Russian tycoons are buying chalets for themselves.
In the midst of all this activity stands the dashing figure of Manuel Fernandez, a former soldier whom the Duchess met some 20 months ago through mutual friends.
The good- l ooking bachelor , who served in the Royal Anglian Regiment, owns a small film com-pany and has an internet venture called vVoosh, which channels some of its profits to the Duchess’s Children In Crisis charity.
In recent months, he has spent a lot of time in Fergie’s company, going on trips abroad with her , attending galas wearing his black velvet dinner jacket, being seen carrying her pashmina and opening car doors for her . He has even stayed (more than once) with her at the Chalet Helora.
Poignantly, one emotional link they share is a proximity to murder. His elder sister Maria, a mother of two, was strangled by her ex -boyfriend at her home in Chelmsford, Essex, in 2008.
Meanwhile, Jane Andrews, who had been an aide to the Duchess for nine years, stabbed her boy - friend Tom Cresswell to death in a frenzy in 2000 because he refused to marry her. Just a few weeks ago, Andrews was released on parole after serving 14 years in prison. But is F ernandez, whose family is Irish-Spanish, really Fergie’s type?
Theirs is described as an ‘intense friendship’, but is it a romance? Close observers say this is unlikely. And charming though his £1million semi in suburban Totteridge, North London, is, it ’s a long way from Royal Lodge, the gracious house on which Andrew has s pent £ 8 million to refurbish.
The Duke funded the renovations thanks largely to the £15 million (£3 m over the asking price) he received from a Kazakh billionaire friend who bought Sunninghill Park, the Y orks’ former marital h home. After the house sold, the Queen is understood to have asked Fergie what she wanted. She re replied: ‘Your friendship, Ma’am.’
Post- divorce, the Duchess has b been linked seriously to only two ot other men, the most significant of whom was probably the Italian aristocrat Count Gaddo della G Gherardesca, who was seen as her co companion for some four years.
More recently there was Norwe - g gian Findus fish tycoon Geir Frantzen, who presented her with a £160,000 Bentley to use when in n England.
Both men, she said, were just ‘good friends’, and t hat w as almost certainly the case. Neither relationship looked par ticula larly romantic. Another figure whose name was linkedli with hers was handsome Wall Street banker J. Todd Morley, a one -timetim business adviser and president of the Sarah F erguson FoundationFoundat charity, which closed three yearsye ago. BusinessBusin talks were ongoing when Morley, a happily mar-ried man with three children, ambitiousambi and very sensitive aboutabou his image, was alarmed to learn that some people were wrongly suggesting that he and the Duchess might be having an affair. He backed a way immediately from Fergie, to her dismay , and no projects ever got off the ground. Few people ever took any of this notion of a long-lasting romance seriously, not least because if Fergie remarried she would lose her title.
‘ Sarah l oves being a duchess far too much to give it up so easily,’ says a friend . ‘ What deals could she do without theth title?’ She was certainly shocked andan almost shaking with angerang when Andrew was accused, in lurid accounts, of having had sex with an under- age so -called ‘sex slave’ of his friend Epstein. ‘I’ll‘ I’ll not have one word said about him on any level,’ she declareddeclar loyally. ‘He’s a great father and humongously good m man.’ GuestsGuest at dinner parties they have given,giv both at Royal Lodge and in Verbier, are surprised to hear the them referring to each other jokily as ‘husband’ and ‘wife’.
And be assured: the dinner parties willwil continue. In their new domestic arrangement in differ-ent countries, Andrew will spend most of the skiing season in Verbier with Fergie, just as he has done theth past three years.
According to friends, the couple, with their daughters Beatrice and Eugenie, were indistinguishable from any other ‘ordinary family’.
Later this month, too, they will all be playing happy families as usual on holiday in Valderrama, the golf resort in southern Spain. No wonder Fergie’s apparent new independence is being viewed in certain royal quar-ters with incredulity.
It certainly hasn ’ t stopped friends speculating on whether she and Andrew might one day consider remarrying — t hough everyone agrees it will never hap - pen while his father, Prince Philip (who was particularly bitter at the shame s he brought on t he Royal Family) is alive to see it.
So, despite everything , the future remains uncertain. But then, wasn’t it always that way with the Duchess of York?
The lurid ‘sex slave’ claims left her shaken