Disgraced British Prince Andrew is back in the headlines for all the wrong reasons.
Even as his brother King Charles has extended a hand to Andrew in reconciliation, inviting him to celebrate Christmas together, a ruling by the Special Immigration Appeals Commission (SIAC) was made public today (12), revealing very damaging information against the Duke of York.
It turns out that a Chinese ‘businessman’ with a close relationship with Andrew – and authorized to seek investors in China on his behalf – has been banned from Britain ‘on national security grounds’, lest he leverage his influence over him.
Reuters reported:
“The 50-year-old man, who has been granted anonymity and is named only as H6, was taken off a flight from Beijing to London in February 2023 and told that Britain intended to ban him from the country. H6 appealed against the ban at the Special Immigration Appeals Commission (SIAC), which rejected his case in a written ruling on Thursday – the first time the reported relationship has come to light.”
At this point, Buckingham Palace no longer comments on Andrew’s scandals since he was stripped of all royal duties in 2022.
“The ban on the Chinese businessman came after the contents of his phone were downloaded when he was stopped under counter-terrorism laws at a UK border in 2021, the ruling said. It said this revealed Prince Andrew had authorized him to set up an international financial initiative to engage with potential partners and investors in China. The ruling did not say what the fund was intended for.”
Documents on the Chinese businessman’s phone suggested he had ‘obscured his links with the Chinese Communist Party’ and the United Front Work Department.
H6 was in a position – the SIAC ruling asserts – to ‘generate relationships between prominent UK figures and senior Chinese officials’ which Beijing could later leverage.
“The United Front Work Department is a network of groups that Chinese leader Xi Jinping has described as a ‘magic weapon’ to bolster Beijing’s reach abroad.”
SIAC’s decision revealed a letter from a senior Andrew advisor noting H6 was invited to Andrew’s birthday party, while a document recovered from a H6’s device says the Duke ‘is in a desperate situation and will grab onto anything’.
“Judge Charles Bourne said in the ruling that H6 had ‘won a significant degree, one could say an unusual degree, of trust from a senior member of the royal family who was prepared to enter into business activities with him. That occurred in a context where, as the contemporaneous documents record, the Duke was under considerable pressure and could be expected to value (H6’s) loyal support. It is obvious that the pressures on the Duke could make him vulnerable to the misuse of that sort of influence’.”
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