 The disgraced Prince Andrew is back in the news this week and he's back in the news for teaming up with a disgraced banker who, like Andrew, is accused of sexual abuse. Yes, you could not make this story up. It was in The Times this week. They report that last summer Prince Andrew went into business with former Coots banker Harry Keough. Now, Coots is a bank used by the very rich, including the royal family, and Keough has apparently worked as Prince Andrew's private banker for over 20 years. However, this is the important background, Keough left Coots in 2018 amid claims of sexual harassment from numerous people. Very serious claims. Let's go to the description in The Times of the issue. They write, at Coots he was accused of touching a woman's groin while demonstrating the site of an injury. His behavior was said to be so toxic that some female staff refused to work with him. The private bank carried out an investigation in 2015 and the chief executive recommended he leave according to the Wall Street Journal. It was decided that he should stay, but he was disciplined and eventually resigned in March 2018. Now, we should know a friend of Keough told the Wall Street Journal that Keough denies the allegations, though he's unable to speak about the matter after signing a non-disclosure agreement with Coots. Now, this is phenomenal, isn't it? Prince Andrew is someone who is currently, he's trying to launder his reputation. We saw him on the BBC a couple of weeks ago. We talked about it on the show, talking about the death of his father. He's saying, I should be able to come back into public life because whilst I hung around with a pedophile, a convicted pedophile, whilst I hung around with him after he was convicted, and whilst I am subject to allegations about sexual abuse of an underage girl, I should be allowed back into public life because I don't know what his explanation is. He still thinks that should be the case. While he is trying to re-establish his reputation, he goes and starts a firm, a business with someone else who has had to leave their job because of very, very widespread credible allegations of sexual abuse. What is this guy thinking? The article has some defences of all of it. None of them are very good, but let's go through them. On the association with Keo, the Times explained that the source close to the Duke said the allegations against Keo don't appear to have been subject to any investigation by law enforcement or independent third parties, and nor have they been tested by a due process in a court of law. It's all fine. None of this was investigated by the police. It was only investigated by his workplace where multiple people complained about sexual harassment, and he ended up having to leave. It's also similar to Andrew's defense, although one of the reasons he hasn't been questioned by law enforcement is because he's refusing to go over to America, which says a lot about his integrity. Let's look at what the company does, which is not quite as shocking as both of their histories when it comes to sexual abuse, but still unsavory, let's say. The company, what it was planning to do was to be a vehicle to allow Prince Andrew to secretly invest his money. Ultimately, it was supposed to serve as a trust fund for his daughters. Some of the facts about this company as well as that he was teaming up with an alleged sexual harasser. First of all, what it would be called, the new venture is named Lincels, after the 18th century battle against the French in which the British were commanded by the Duke of York. Now, I love this because it tells you so much about Prince Andrew's self-perception and the reality. His self-perception is he is someone who's leading troops into battle. He is a really significant guy who's sacrificing for his country and leading men when in reality what he's doing is setting up a very secretive company with a fellow alleged sexual harasser who looks like basically hide his money. Now, I'm saying hide his money, let's go on to the nature of this company, the structure of this company because we are told it was set up as an unlimited company and this means that it is not required to file accounts with company's house or report its profits or income. That's in fact why people set up these unlimited companies because they want to be shrouded in secrecy. The flip side why you might say why doesn't everyone set up an unlimited company? No one wants to be transparent. The reason is there are some downsides which is that in a limited company, which is a limited liability company, if you get into lots of debt, that debt doesn't accrue to you personally. If you're a director, it accrues to the company. So the company goes bankrupt, that doesn't mean you necessarily will. In an unlimited company, if the company goes bankrupt, you go bankrupt. For some more details on what this means and what an unlimited company means, we can go to Ella Leonard who is a corporate expert at the law firm, Flatgate and she told The Times as the name suggests the shareholders of an unlimited company are liable if it cannot pay its debts should it have to be wound up. The main benefits of an unlimited company are reduced disclosure obligations. Unlimited companies are usually exempt from delivering annual accounts to company's house and filing notifications that new shares have been issued as well as having some greater flexibility in returning invested cash to shareholders. It is fair to say that we do not come across unlimited companies that often, that often precisely because of the shareholder liability point. And so there must be a very specific reason for using one. It's worth noting David Cameron currently embroiled in the green seal scandal also controls one of these secretive companies, as does Andrew Mills, who is a former government advisor, who last year brokered a PPE deal with the government worth 250 million pounds. Who are the people that govern us? This is so depressing. Yeah, I mean, the question is, why do we allow these things? But we don't have that much of a choice. Do we? I mean, the whole point of being a royal is that you literally answer to no one. And nobody encapsulates that better than Prince Andrew. And I actually looked this up. So the monarch, so in this case, the Queen can't actually ever be arrested or prosecuted for anything because of sovereign immunity. And no other member of the royal family can be arrested if they are in her presence, or within the surroundings of a royal palace. In 2002, Princess Anne was fined 500 pounds and had to pay compensation to a family when her dog attacked a child. And that's the first member of the royal family to ever plead guilty to a criminal offense. Now, I know, when it comes to this unlimited company, we're not dealing with a criminal offense. It's terrible, but it's legal. But it kind of gives you an understanding of how this class operates. It's essentially a public law. And so why would he not engage in beneficial and lucrative behavior and make decisions that are bad form? All he risks is embarrassment. And I think Andrew has proved himself immune to that, immune to feeling embarrassed or ashamed. So when we create a system of people who are by almost by definition unaccountable, then we can't really act surprised when they behave in a messy way. But once again, we see this like embeddedness of shadow finance, of shadow banking in the operation of our economic and political systems. You know, the whole point of this company that he set up is to be able to move money around to invest without any kind of public scrutiny, without any scrutiny by regulatory bodies. And that fits in that that's an incredibly important part of our economy. Like that is an integral part of our economy. And it also fits into the role that Britain plays in the world, like a lot of the, you know, this facilitating of offshoring of concealment of secrecy of, of, you know, of all of these, these kind of things that have come to define actually the majority of banking activity, you know, they have their legacies in empire, a lot of the territories that are still under British control, places like the British Virgin Islands are offshore tax havens. And a lot of global financial markets operate in that unregulated space, which relies on secrecy, informality, untraceability. So that, that is the norm. It's not the exception. And I think, you know, can we even call it corruption when that is actually the backbone of how our economic system is set up when you look at the concept of an unlimited company, the only person who's going to set up an unlimited company is someone who's rich enough to be liable in the case of, you know, bankruptcy. So it is literally a mechanism that is exclusively for only the very, very, very rich to be, to evade any kind of public scrutiny or transparency. And so I think we actually miss a trick when we talk about this. And I, and I actually, you know, think the same thing about how we talk about Tory chumocracy and, you know, even calling it corruption, I think that you can't call something corruption when it is the embedded logic of the state and the economic system. So I think we miss a trick actually, when we act as if Andrew in this particular case is doing something particularly egregious, because actually this kind of behavior represents the majority of financial activity. So the question isn't why do we let it happen in the case of Andrew? The question is, why do we let it happen at all? I take your point, it might not be particularly exceptionally egregious, but I think he is exceptionally incompetent. So I use the past tense in some of the first part of that segment because it turns out that after taking the reputational hit of setting up a company with an alleged sexual harasser, this firm, it has never in fact channeled any of Prince Andrew's investments. This was a story in the Telegraph, which suggests that after making this very, very secretive company with this very, very dodgy guy, Prince Andrew was told this would be inappropriate. And so it has never made any investment. So he's taken this hit and it's flopped. So the Telegraph, right, the Duke was advised that while such ventures are fairly standard for ultra high net worth individuals, they were not appropriate for a member of the royal family. As such, the company was abandoned and has never been used. I suppose that this is a guy who thought that a good defense was that he was eating at Pizza Express when he was asked about a picture of him with an underage girl who had accused him of sexual abuse. So the fact that he starts a company without having for, oh, maybe look a bit dodgy if I do this and then having to shut it down before it does anything is not particularly surprising. I do want to return to one thing in this tires piece as well, because it is worth pointing out this isn't the only project Andrew has had to abandon. Now, giving background to another man who was involved in the Duke's unlimited company, the Times wrote, Lynn cells, sole director is Dominic Hampshire, the secretary of the Quad Centenary Club, which was set up to raise funds for the Royal Black Keith Golf Club in London, and which counts the Duke as its chairman. Hampshire, who describes himself as a golf professional on Compass House filings, was also involved in the Duke of York Young Champions Trophy, a golf tournament for under 18s, which was axed after the Epstein scandal. The guy who ran Prince Andrew's secretive firm, so he was the director, Prince Andrew was a controller alongside this guy from Coots Bank. He was told he had to close it down because it looked bad for the Royals. This same guy also ran a Young Champions Trophy, which had to be shut down after Andrew was found to have close associations with a pedophile. Why would you keep entering into projects with this guy? The first one you have to shut down because he's been hanging out of a pedo and this is a competition for young people. The second time you agreed to be the director of this limited company, unlimited company, sorry, which is going to be investing his money for his kids, which then has to be shut down because Prince Andrew was such an idiot. He didn't ask anyone who would tell him that actually if you're in this quite delicate constitutional arrangement where the Royals are trying to retain their legitimacy, you probably shouldn't set up secretive companies, as if you're just any old international financier who wasn't paid for by the taxpayer. Why does anyone associate with this man? Just comes back to, he doesn't feel shame. He doesn't feel embarrassment. In fact, I'm sure that Prince Andrew feels deeply victimized by this entire, by everything that has happened over the past several years. He's thinking, I'm just doing what everyone else does, everyone else in my class. And I both mean that in terms of this shadow financing stuff. I also mean it in the harassment of underage women and thinking, why am I the one who's getting the flak for this? I think that it's a combination of being shielded from consequence by virtue of his position and that creating delusion and creating his own sense of his own, which we can see in the naming of his company. But it's also a sense of I am sure that he has created this massive victim narrative for himself and that's what helps him sleep at night.