Cash For Gongs: Prince Charles honoured tycoon Lord Brownlow who bailed out his failed eco-village
https://tlio.org.uk/cash-for-gongs-prince-charles-honoured-tycoon-lord-brownlow-who-bailed-out-his-failed-eco-village/
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/prince-charles-honoured-tycoon-lord-brownlow-who-bailed-out-his-eco-village-z2l9cx2mk?shareToken=fce657019d1d0091db4a2ac2145e2f1b
9 July 2022 Tony Gosling Leave a comment Edit
Prince Charles honoured tycoon Lord Brownlow who bailed out his failed eco-village
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/prince-charles-honoured-tycoon-lord-brownlow-who-bailed-out-his-eco-village-z2l9cx2mk?shareToken=fce657019d1d0091db4a2ac2145e2f1b
Heir to the throne ignored aides advice against close ties with Tory peer
Gabriel Pogrund Saturday July 02 2022, The Sunday Times
The Prince of Wales gave an honour to a controversial Tory peer who spent 1.7 million bailing out his failed eco-village in a string of secretive deals being investigated by the charity watchdog.Prince Charles presented Lord Brownlow with the award during a ceremony at Buckingham Palace after accepting millions of pounds in donations from him.
His flagship charity also opened up Dumfries House, his 18th-century country estate in Scotland, for Brownlow’s 50th birthday a black-tie event involving fireworks, bagpipes and a performance by a celebrity magician and awarded the businessman’s company a 1.2 million construction contract.
Lord Brownlow was made a Commander of the Victorian Order (CVO), an elite honour approved by the Queen
Brownlow, a recruitment tycoon, is best known for his role in funding the refurbishment of Boris Johnson’s Downing Street flat and was also recently reported to have been considered as a potential donor to pay 150,000 for a treehouse for the prime ministers son.
Charles became close with the peer, whose fortune has been estimated at 271 million by The Sunday Times Rich List in 2020, after ignoring the advice of one of his most senior courtiers. The palace insider was concerned Brownlow, 58, was using Charles to burnish his reputation, felt he had myriad conflicts of interest and believed his judgment was wayward. They shared their views with the prince.
In 2013 Charles, 73, appointed Brownlow as a trustee of the Princes Foundation, which manages Dumfries House.
Charles had bought the mansion from the Marquess of Bute by taking out a 20 million loan six years earlier.
He also acquired a nearby piece of farmland, Knockroon, at a cut-price rate. Charles saw the construction and sale of faux-Georgian homes there as an ideal way of repaying the Dumfries House debt. The development was also supposed to bring jobs and homes to a depressed former mining community and exhibit his values of traditional and sustainable architecture in practice.
There was a severe shortfall in demand: just 31 of 770 homes were built and its value was written down from 15 million to 700,000. By 2015 Hope Homes, the princes developer, had withdrawn from the project and a leading Scottish architect, Professor Alan Dunlop, described the princes vision as an imported pastiche and a curious mix of relatively expensive homes dropped into a rural setting that should have never been built.
Today plans to complete Knockroon have been abandoned. Residents complain it is a ghost town that Charles rarely visits despite routinely spending weekends entertaining donors and relaxing and unwinding at his nearby estate.
Brownlow incorporated his own property company, Havisham Properties, and started buying homes at Knockroon from a subsidiary of the Princes Foundation. Between 2012 and 2017 he spent 1.7 million purchasing 11 properties and converting them into buy-to-lets and a cafe according to official documents. The charity did not declare any of the purchases as related party transactions. This is a standard measure used to guard against perceived conflicts of interest and to demonstrate that trustees knew that money was going to someone who had existing ties to the charity.
It is unclear whether Brownlow paid for the use of the estate for his birthday in 2013
During this period the foundation also awarded Brownlows company a series of contracts. In 2015 it gave him an estimated 1.2 million worth of work to build three properties on the estate, which a source said were cottages for staff. In the same year the charity seconded charitable staff to run Da Vincis, his companys cafe housed in what was supposed to be Knockroon visitor centre. It also purchased an item of home furnishing on behalf of Mr Brownlow which he later repaid, and paid him 8,590 in rent. The following year, accounts state that his company received 715,668 for building the staff homes. The foundation would not say if there was an open competition or tender exercise to award the contracts.
