‘Suitcase, Carrier Bags & Holdall’: Prince Charles Was Reportedly Given €3M in Cash by Qatar Sheikh

The fresh report feeds into previous allegations of Prince Charles’ charities receiving dubious donations. A ‘cash for honours’ scandal erupted last year after The Mail on Sunday published a letter revealing that Michael Fawcett, The Prince's Foundation chief executive, had offered to help a Saudi tycoon obtain British citizenship and a knighthood.

Charles, Prince of Wales, received millions of euros in cash in three installments from Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber Al-Thani, the former prime minister of Qatar, The Sunday Times reported.

The money, totaling €3 million (£2.6m), was passed to the heir apparent to the British throne and the eldest son of Queen Elizabeth II between 2011 and 2015.

On one occasion, Prince Charles was given a suitcase containing €1 million in the form of €500 notes. Two of the prince’s advisers are said to have subsequently hand-counted it. Palace aides requested Coutts, the private bank headquartered in the Strand, which acts for the royal family, to collect the cash from Prince Charles’s London residence, the outlet stated.

One of Prince Charles’s former advisers was cited as saying that “everyone felt very uncomfortable about the situation,” adding that the “only thing we could do was to count the money and make a mutual record of what we’d done. And then call the bank”.

A holdall was used for the wads of cash in another instance, while, once, around €1 million was reportedly stuffed into carrier bags from Fortnum & Mason. The luxury department store is the proud owner of a Royal Warrant to supply the prince’s household with groceries.

One of these instances of cash-awarding purportedly involved a private in-person encounter between Prince Charles and the senior Qatari politician at Clarence House in 2015.

Each of the reported cash payments was subsequently deposited into the accounts of the Prince of Wales’s Charitable Fund (PWCF). Founded by HRH The Prince of Wales in 1979, it operates a small grants programme embracing the royal’s several favourite projects.

While there is no suggestion the payments were illegal, the British royal’s meetings with Sheikh Hamad are not listed in the Court Circular - list of official engagements undertaken by working royals, the outlet added.

In line with the official gift policy, members of the royal family are allowed to accept a “cheque” as a patron of, or on behalf of, a charity. There is no specification regarding cash.

‘No Failure of Governance’

In a statement following the report, a Clarence House spokesman said the cash received by Prince Charles during the 2015 meeting was “passed immediately to one of the prince’s charities who carried out the appropriate covenants and assured us that all the correct processes were followed”.

The chair of the trustees to Prince of Wales’s Charitable Fund confirmed to the outlet that the 2015 donation had been made in cash at the “donor’s choice”.

It was added that the trustees, “discussed the governance and donor relationship, (confirming that the donor was a legitimate and verified counterparty) and our auditors signed off on the donation after a specific enquiry during the audit. There was no failure of governance”.

There is no evidence the Qatari sheikh did not intend the money to go to the charity, the report added.

Nevertheless, Sir Alistair Graham, the former chairman of the committee on standards in public life, was cited as deploring the “truly shocking” disclosures, adding that it would be “inconceivable” to most people.

“I wouldn’t make a distinction between a politician and a member of the royal family. If the Qatari government wants to make a gift to his foundation, then there are proper ways to do these things rather than handling large sums of cash,” Graham was quoted as saying.

‘Man Who Bought London’

Prince Charles and Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber Al-Thani, one of the richest people in the world, have purportedly maintained a relationship going back several decades. The Qatari sheikh, whose personal wealth was estimated to be around $12 billion, was once dubbed the “man who bought London” after he made huge investments in the UK capital, including the Shard London Bridge, a 72-storey skyscraper and the tallest building in the UK. This came between 2007 and 2013, when Sheikh Hamad served as Qatar’s prime minister and minister of foreign affairs. At the time, he controlled the country’s $250 billion sovereign wealth fund and was also able to oversee the Gulf state’s investments into Harrods department store and the InterContinental London Park Lane luxury hotel in Mayfair. Furthermore, the oil and gas-rich nation presented Prince Charles with a £147,000 horse named Dark Swan and contributed to the upkeep of Dumfries House, the Ayrshire mansion which the royal and his Prince’s Foundation acquired in 2007, added the outlet.

However, the sheikh has been mired in controversy after once claiming that Qatar “maybe” financed the Nusra Front (Jabhat al-Nusra*), the Syrian branch of al-Qaeda*, while he was in office, although adding that he knew nothing about it.

The current report comes as Clarence House has been forced to dismiss claims of a “cash-for-access” culture, after Prince Charles’s closest confidant, Michael Fawcett, was accused of selling honours. Fawcett resigned as CEO of The Prince’s Foundation in 2021 after The Mail on Sunday published a letter from 2017 in which Fawcett reportedly wrote that he was willing to make an application to change businessman Mahfouz Marei Mubarak bin Mahfouz’s honorary CBE to a KBE, and support his application for citizenship. Both the Metropolitan Police and Charity Commission are currently investigating the letter and fundraising practices.

*Al-Qaeda, al-Nusra Front, are terrorist organisations banned in Russia and many other countries.