So the story is about the rise of David Rowland, the son of a scrap metal
dealer from South London who rose to become the
confidant to Prince Andrew. He had acquired this, this Luxembourg bank, Kaupthing Bank, and they proceeded to turn Kaupthing, Luxembourg into what they
now called Banque Havilland. Prince Andrew had become some kind of a roving ambassador for the Rowlands. You know, with their unofficial door opener of Prince Andrew, they kind of went around
the world hoovering up clients from among the ranks of the world's sort of worst
kleptocrats and criminals. I don't think anyone comes
out well out of this tale. Prince Andrew certainly
does not come out well. You have the Queen's favorite son going out and basically
being a glorified salesman for this really quite dodgy bank. We thought it would be
absolutely fascinating to start having a better, more in-depth look at what is Banque Havilland? Who are the Rowlands? And what is their relationship
with Prince Andrew? So David Rowland had
very humble beginnings. He left school at 16. He's
a short guy, barrel-chested. He's got to kind of
near-permanent scowl on his face. He peppers his speech with foul expletives. He is a rough character, who has done very well for himself. By the 1990s, he was well-off enough to set up a family office, and this family office was not
just handling his own money, it was almost like a
shadow banking operation. They would provide finance loans to the types of people who
couldn't otherwise get it but they were very wealthy. Not many people in the U.K. would have heard of him
until probably about late 2010s around that sort of time when a lot of these stories
started coming about about his friendship with Prince Andrew. So Prince Andrew is the second son of the Queen of England, and he is by some
reports her favorite son. He's never been in any danger
of being any particularly close to becoming King or
anything like that, you know so his older brother,
Charles is going to be king. You know, he didn't go to university. He went straight into the Navy. He then became a pilot
and by all accounts, served very bravely in the Falklands War as a helicopter pilot. That's my helicopter flying over at the moment I think it's almost time I should go, somebody is telling me it's time to go. But after that, once he left the Royal Navy in the 80's he seemed to have become a
bit of a lost soul. He became a kind of magnet for somewhat disreputable people. Quite how Prince Andrew
and David Rowland got into a similar orbit
is not entirely clear. All we do know is that they did. We know that they've been
friends since at least 2005, and one of the earliest
photographs we have of the two of them together
is Andrew unveiling a larger than life size
statue of David Rowland on his Guernsey estate. And they are an odd pair. Obviously David Rowland is a sort of working class boy done good. Whereas Andrew is a prince
of the realm who was born into fabulous wealth and, you know, raised in palaces and castles. As we go on air, there are crisis talks about how to stabilize the banking system. - What started in America last year has now spread to every part of the world. Well, we're down 9%... What you had was in 2008, 2009, you had this banking crash,
and if you had some money and you were pretty sort of, risk tolerant, there was an
amazing opportunity there, and the Rowlands seized it. They absolutely seized this opportunity. Kaupthing had been one of the big victims of the financial crisis. It was this Icelandic bank that went off on this massive lending spree. And it all came to a
juddering halt in 2008. About 30,000 shareholders
were in Kaupthing when the bank collapsed. David Rowland came in and he bought the Luxembourg arm of Kaupthing Bank. They were somewhat desperate to find a buyer. The best buyer before the
Rowlands turned up was the Libyan Sovereign Wealth Fund. So there weren't a lot of takers
for Banque Havilland, so that's why David Rowland
managed to get it so cheap. And they started to proceed to turn what the renamed now Banque Havilland into this private banking business based in Luxembourg and going
after the world's wealthy as private banks do. Private banks are there
to serve the interests the wealth of, of wealthy people, but it had a slightly
different business model to most of them. So we find that them going off on this amazing worldwide jaunt to basically bank the world's
dodgiest people. You know, we're talking dictators, we're talking scammers. You know, if you had dodgy money the Rowlands were seemingly
interested in you, and it didn't really seem to be any limits to who they'd go after. So for instance, you'd see them go for the leadership of Azerbaijan, which is one of the world's
most corrupt countries on earth. The Rowlands flew to Azerbaijan with Prince Andrew on their private jet a number of times to meet with President Aliyev and his family. Prince Andrew at the time was a trade ambassador for the U.K., so he had tried to carve
out this role for himself and the government had
carved out this role for him as a special trade envoy
for the U.K. Ostensibly he was an ambassador for British business and with his royal title,
doors could be open for him that wouldn't be
open to ordinary mortals. And the Rowlands looked to effectively use this relationship, this special
place that Prince Andrew had to basically get to people
that they wouldn't have otherwise been able to. You know, remember Banque
Havilland is a tiny, tiny institution. You're only talking probably about a billion or so of assets. So if you have this small business and you want to get
into or close to people with lots of money, you need a special in, and it seemed like their
special in was Prince Andrew. They quickly build up a relationship with Aliyev's family. You might not think that
there's anything wrong with dealing with presidents of countries, but at the time that the Rowlands
were visiting with Aliyev, he had already been accused
by human rights groups of torturing opposition
politicians, of jailing journalists, of changing the constitution
to make him president for life. Leaked U.S. diplomatic cables
described him as a mafia hood who ran Azerbaijan in a manner of sort of feudalism in Europe in the middle ages. Both sides of the
Atlantic in recent years, there's been a big crackdown
on money laundering and that has made most
banks incredibly wary of who they take on as clients. But the Rowlands were a
bit different, you know, with their unofficial
door opener of Prince Andrew they kind of went around the world hoovering up clients from among the ranks of the world's
sort of worst kleptocrats. A sort of prize example
of that is Kola Aluko. He was a Nigerian oil magnate who came to the Rowlands in 2015 to get a 25 million euro loan. Now if the Rowlands had
done a Google search on him at the time, they
would have discovered that he, he was already under
investigation in Nigeria for his part in a massive,
massive fraud there, involving bribery and corruption and the awarding of oil contracts, but they loaned him 25 million euros, and sure enough, within days
of that loan being signed the Nigerian, former
Nigerian oil minister was arrested for her part in the fraud, and the police started
looking for Kola Aluko. Arguably the pinnacle of David Rowland's social climb was the 2018 wedding of
Prince Andrew's daughter, Eugenie. Here, you have a
granddaughter of the Queen marrying a, on national television, at St. George's chapel, which is the same place where Prince Harry and Meghan
Markle got married, and you have all of the great
and the good of the country are, are going in there to be seated to, to witness this occasion. ...to join together this
man and this woman... You know, he had front row seats with his wife. They were in the aisle
sitting next to Kate Moss. And there you have David Rowland. In... less than six decades, David Rowland had ascended from being the son of a scrap metal dealer, to, to rubbing shoulders with royalty. But already at that time, the legal noose was, was tightening around his bank. Kola Aluko had, um, defaulted on the 25 million euro loan that he owed to Banque Havilland, and that had led to
the biggest foreclosure in New York history on
this condo that he owned, and it became tabloid fodder, and for the first time
Banque Havilland were linked to this central figure in one of Nigeria's biggest ever frauds. And that caught the attention of the Luxembourg regulators back home, who took a look at Banque Havilland's dealings with Aluko, and really didn't like what they found. When they took a deeper look into Banque Havilland's clients they found that they were also banking the daughters of President Aliyev and other prominent Azerbaijanis, and they found that they'd done so with very little due
diligence, in terms of background checks into the
source of their wealth. It isn't much fun being
Prince Andrew these days ever since photographs emerged of him with his arm around the
waist of a young girl in the entourage of Jeffrey Epstein, he has been somewhat toxic. These days he seldom leaves
the confines of Windsor Park where he lives in his,
in a nice big house. So the bank's old buccaneering
ways are very much behind it. And what you have is this
agreement between the two sides that Banque Havilland will
lower its risk appetite. The problem you then
have obviously is that, well if you're just a normal private bank trying to go after the same
people everyone else is, why would you bank at
Banque Havilland, right? Why wouldn't you go to
some other bigger place that has more services? And the simple answer to that is you would go to one of those places, most likely. In which case Banque
Havilland really doesn't have a purpose any longer.
