Convicted gun smuggler at Duchess of York’s 60th
MINGLING among the guests who attended a surprise 60th birthday party for Sarah, Duchess of York was Tarek Kaituni, a convicted gun smuggler and long-standing, if controversial, friend of her former husband.
It has now emerged that the birthday bash, held in October 2019 at the Royal Lodge home in Windsor Great Park shared by the Duke and Duchess, was partially funded by one of Kaituni’s associates, the alleged fraudster Selman Turk.
It was Kaituni who The Sunday Telegraph can now reveal introduced Mr Turk to the Duke of York in the early summer of 2019, a few months before the party was held.
Mr Turk is now embroiled in a High Court battle over an alleged international £40 million fraud, as part of which he gave the Duke more than a million pounds, along with a payment of £225,000 to the Duchess through a third party account.
Court documents revealed by this newspaper show that Mr Turk, who hosted the Duke and Mr Kaituni at a dinner at his home in December 2019, also instructed £25,000 to be paid to the Duke and Duchess’s daughter Princess Eugenie over the course of two days in October that year.
The second payment of £15,000 was listed as a birthday gift to the Princess, but was in fact to pay for the surprise party thrown by the Duke for his former wife.
It was certainly a lavish affair, with other guests including Ellie Goulding, Robbie Williams and Julian Fellowes.
Princess Eugenie has now said that at the time she understood the payments to be “gifts from a long-standing family friend to assist with the cost of a sur surprise party for my mother, Sarah, Duchess of York’s 60th birthday.”
She added: “In early October 2019 I had received a call from our family friend saying that he wanted to make a financial contribution towards my mother’s birthday party to assist with the catering costs. I suggested that any contribution could be made directly to the caterers, but in the event provided my account details to which two payments were made totalling £25,000, which I then transferred on to the company organising my mother’s party.”
By the time the party was held Kaituni, who spent the evening mingling with the 100 guests sipping pink Laurent Perrier champagne, already enjoyed regular access to the Duke and his family.
In October 2018 he had been a guest at Princess Eugenie’s wedding to Jack Brooksbank in St George’s Chapel, Windsor, and went on to attend the exclusive black-tie reception for the couple’s closest friends and family at the Royal Lodge.
In 2009 Kaituni presented Princess Eugenie’s sister Beatrice with an £18,000 gold and diamond necklace after he was invited by Prince Andrew to her 21st birthday party in Spain. Photographs from the party show the Duke sitting near Kaituni, who was married to the Dutch model Lisa van Goinga. The gift for Princess Beatrice came just months before the Duke allegedly lobbied a British company on Kaituni’s behalf. When details of the meeting emerged in 2011 the Palace said the Duke had not been involved “in any discussion involving the remuneration of Kaituni”. Kaituni first met the Duke in 2005 – the same year he was convicted of attempting to smuggle a machine gun from Holland to France. Kaituni spent several years on remand in a Paris jail for smuggling the gun before he was given a two-month suspended sentence, and fined 10,000 Euros a year later. He had already spent a year in jail for possession of drugs in Tunisia in 1998.
Kaituni introduced him to Sakher El Materi, the ‘“notoriously corrupt” sonin-law of deposed Tunisian president Zine Ben Ali.
He also accompanied the Duke to a meeting with the Libyan dictator Colonel Gaddafi at Materi’s Tunisian home in August 2008. Three months later they flew to Tripoli for another meeting with the Libyan leader, who was deposed in 2011.
Buckingham Palace subsequently said it was the Duke’s job to “develop long-term relations with key individuals” in his then-capacity as a trade envoy for Britain and that this was “always for the betterment of British interests”.
In 2011 Kaituni told undercover reporters he was optimistic he could ensure the Duke’s presence at the launch of a proposed golf resort in Libya in return for a fee. “I can maybe influence him to be there for the opening. Maybe he will do it for me,” he said.
Kaituni’s subsequent appearance at the Duchess’s 60th birthday party – during which the Duke praised his exwife for standing by him in his “hour of need” – appeared to reinforce his role in the Duke’s circle of friends and moneyed acquaintances, a circle that is once again under close scrutiny.