Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor is due to mark another phase in his retreat from public life as one of his last companies closes down.
The disgraced royal’s start-up Pitch@Palace is due to be struck off from Companies House on Tuesday 3 February, less than a decade after the former Duke of York established it in 2017.
In October, Buckingham Palace announced that Andrew would have his royal titles stripped due to the ongoing controversy over his friendship with the late paedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein.
While his Pitch@Palace business, which was inspired by Dragons’ Den, managed to survive the initial fallout in 2019, the UK branch closed in 2021, and it is now being dissolved.
The scheme had initially won Andrew praise for helping young people get into the business world, as it encouraged entrepreneurs to pitch their ideas to potential investors and compete for funding.
In a document filed with Companies House signed off by Arthur Lancaster, the firm’s sole director, the company filed an application to be “struck off and dissolved”.
Companies House lists Prince Andrew of Royal Lodge, Windsor, as having “significant influence or control” over the business.
Andrew resigned from his role with Pitch@Palace in 2019 after the backlash that followed the interview he gave to the BBC’s Newsnight programme, in which he was quizzed over his ties to Epstein. The former duke has vehemently denied any wrongdoing.
The latest set of accounts showed it had £10,965 in cash at the end of March, down from £220,990 the year before.
The business was mired in controversy last year when it emerged that the founder-partner of Pitch@Palace China was an alleged spy. Yang Tengbo, who is said to have become a close confidant of Andrew, was banned from the UK by the Home Office.
While Andrew stepped down from royal duties in 2019 after his disastrous Newsnight interview, the publication of Virginia Giuffre’s posthumous memoir, and the US government’s release of documents from Epstein’s estate, brought more scrutiny over his relationship with the financier.
The King took action by stripping his younger brother of his birthright to be a prince and his dukedom over his “serious lapses of judgment”.
He is set to move from Royal Lodge in Windsor Great Park, which it emerged he had only paid peppercorn rent on for more than two decades, sometime this year to the King’s private Sandringham estate.
The former prince has for many years been dogged by allegations he sexually abused Giuffre after she was trafficked by Epstein, claims Andrew had repeatedly denied.
It also emerged before Christmas that he had emailed Epstein in 2011 saying “we’re in this together”, three months after he claimed he had broken all contact with the convicted paedophile.
He paid millions to Giuffre, a woman he has claimed never to have met, to settle a civil sexual assault claim in 2022.
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