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.