Prince Albert marries his sweetheart Charlene Wittstock, July 2011 at the Chapelle Royal Palace in Monaco/Reuters
A scandal that has been brewing since 2021 - involving the most powerful people in the tiny principality of Monaco, including Prince Albert, the "Gang of Four" who were his former confidants, a connected real estate developer and now Princess Charlene - took a surprising turn over the past weekend.
Claude Palmero, accountant A veteran of the royal family, the Grimaldi family, was disgraced last year from his role at the Rose Palace, after 22 years of service with Prince Albert. He succeeded his father who served as the late Prince Rainier's accountant. Now he is taking his revenge in spectacular fashion.
This is a story that could have turned For one of Alfred Hitchcock's films, in which Prince Albert's mother, the late Princess Grace Kelly, starred: Palmero, 67, handed over to the French newspaper Le Monde five black notebooks containing detailed notes on decades of the palace's financial secrets and revealed quite a few scandals and corruptions.
Prince Albert II of Monaco/GettyImages, Pascal Le Segretain
The notebooks have become a four-part series of articles - with sinister titles such as "The Fall of the Man Who Knew Too Much" - and they shine an embarrassing light on the professional and personal weaknesses of the 65-year-old Prince Albert, who is estimated to be worth more than a billion dollars as head of the House of Grimaldi, which has ruled Monaco since 1160.
Among other things, his demand to finance a second and secret bachelor apartment after his marriage to former Olympic swimmer Charlene Wittstock in 2011 and the allocation of $650,000 a year in "special funds" for "secret missions" and "parallel activities" were revealed.
These "secret missions" included, among other things, paying some police officers for "useful information" and for "obtaining offensive and incriminating images."
In a separate interview with the French newspaper Libération, Palmerau added that Prince Albert kept a secret account in a French bank, under the initials AG, to covertly pay his former lovers and their children.
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The knives were drawn against the spendthrift princess
Princess Charlene of Monaco, November 2023/GettyImages, David Niviere/SC Pool - Corbis/
Until now, Albert's sometimes estranged wife, 46-year-old Princess Charlene, has been portrayed in the media as an enigmatic but fragile and troubled woman.
Palmero's notebooks also paint her as a spendthrift, as of December 2019 she spent more than $16 million on personal needs in eight years.
"These exercises of hers are dangerous," Palmero wrote in one of his notebooks.
"It's crazy! I have no control over the princess's expenses."
The notebooks detail that Charlene receives an annual allowance of about $1.6 million, but her husband also regularly gives her additional payments, including $650,000 in 2017 "to cover her overdraft."
"They're really trying to get in on her," a 35-year-old resident of Monaco, who knows Princess Charlene personally, told the New York Post, referring to what she says both palace officials and some powerful Monaco residents are doing.
"She didn't play by their rules like she was supposed to and they were fed up with her. Nobody ever really liked her - she has a cold personality - but now the knives have really been drawn."
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Prince Albert II of Monaco and Princess Charlene attend a gala at Forum Grimaldi during Monaco's National Day on November 19, 2023/GettyImages, Stephane Cardinale/PLS Pool
Palmero also wrote at length in the notebooks about Charlene's questionable spending habits, which he said included hiring illegal immigrant nannies without visas or passports as part of her eight-person staff - to whom she paid a paltry $100 a day.
After Albert and Charlene's twins, Gabriela and Jacques, were born in 2014, they were placed in the care of nannies who were illegal immigrants, according to the notebooks.
"'Her Majesty the Princess makes people work for her even though they don't meet the requirements of the law,' Palmero warned Prince Albert.
He also noted that there is a "Filipino woman who works illegally for the princess and ties up dogs in the shower."
Another time, Palmero wrote: 'Update on hiring nannies - we are totally illegal (even their tourist visa expired on January 7th).
Not only are they staying illegally, but one of them entered with a fake passport."
"Monaco has always been full of wall-to-wall scandals and many explosive stories that have just been mysteriously silenced, the secret payments that have been revealed are not really that unexpected," said Alison Coe, author A veteran of the French Riviera who has a blog that includes a focus on Monaco, to The Post.
"With all the big money flying around this little princess, I don't think anyone is really that shocked, except of course the part about the low-wage household staff.
It's pretty embarrassing.
What really amazed everyone was how everything was published," Ko added. "Everybody likes to see the upper echelon get what they deserve, and in Monaco it usually happens in the most spectacular way possible."
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"The final proof that the king is naked"
Deposed Palmero apparently lost a power struggle between Prince Albert's advisers and Monaco's most powerful real estate man, Patrice Pasteur, in the battle for the principality's ultra-lucrative property market last spring, after a mysterious website called "Les Dossiers du Rocher" - documents The Rock - began exposing what it claimed were the corrupt secrets of Prince Albert's inner circle.
The site accused Palmero, Prince Laurent Anselmy's chief of staff, the prince's lawyer and childhood friend Thierry Lacoste, and the president of Monaco's Supreme Court, Didier Linnot, of fraud. Money laundering, appointing associates to key positions and corruption as well as unfairly influencing Monaco's rich real estate and property market.
The four executives denied any involvement in the alleged corruption and even filed official complaints after the website began leaking their information.
Many of those close to the so-called "Gang of Four" believe that the source of these leaks is Pasteur, scion of a real estate empire with enormous influence in the kingdom, and that he is the one behind the hacking of their email and bank records. Pasteur has denied the allegations and now seems to have won the trust of Prince Albert himself.
"This is the final proof that the king is naked," said Robert Eringer, who worked for Albert as an intelligence adviser from 2002 to 2007. He added that he had already warned the prince about Palmero, Lacoste and the others not looking out for his interests. "Albert is guilty of the porridge he cooked." , said Eringer, who also has his own blog where he writes about the royal family.
"Monaco is in an internal war all the time.
Palmero was deeply entrenched in the factional fights.
What I did for Albert was to be the decent mediator who pointed out these warring factions.
I looked at them as cancer cells, and I think I was the first to discover Palmero.
But the prince fired me instead of him.
Albert has a hard time with confrontations.
He runs away from it."
The payments to the mistresses and the illegitimate children
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The secret notebooks also provide a glimpse of money paid to Albert's legitimate and illegitimate relatives.
Albert's sisters, Princess Caroline and Princess Stephanie, receive annual allowances of $780,000 and $690,000 respectively, according to Le Monde.
Princess Charlene's brother, 41-year-old Sean Wittstock, received about $800,000 to buy a house.
Prince Albert was also very generous with his 31-year-old illegitimate daughter, Jasmine Grace Grimaldi.
Emma Tamara Rotolo, a former waitress who had a brief affair with Albert, fought for a long time for Albert to recognize Jazmin as his daughter and even ambushed him at public events.
It paid off.
Jazmin currently lives in an apartment worth 3 million dollars in the Tribeca neighborhood of Manhattan, which Albert bought for her six years ago.
She receives an annual allowance of about $344,000, according to the notebooks.
So is her half-brother, Alexandre Grimaldi-Cost, 20, whose mother is Togo-born former flight attendant Nicole Cost.
Alexander and Nicole are often seen at the palace, but the notebooks reveal a very bad relationship between Nicole and Charlene.
Nicole was going to cost the palace $850,000 a year in 2015, Palermo warned Albert, according to the notebooks.
She then received another $350,000 and left for London, where Albert bought her an apartment.
However, he registered the property in Alexander's name because Nicole reportedly feared there would be "big problems" with Princess Charlene if Prince Albert died.
In addition to exposing the dirt on the Grimaldi royal family (whose official form of address is not Your Highness but Your Serene Highness), Palmero is also suing his former employer for a million dollars and angrily denying claims from the palace that he stole money.
"I never took a cent," Palmero told Le Monde.
"I deny it 100 percent. I am neither corrupt nor a thief. These are unbelievable things that the princely family, for which I dedicated myself for two decades, accuse me unjustly today."
Prince Albert responded in an official statement that "Palmero's attacks against me and against the state of Monaco and its institutions show his true nature and the little respect he has for the family and the principalities."
Eringer concluded to The Post that as bad as all the revelations seem, Albert's reign is pretty much assured no matter what happens.
"There is no authority in Monaco that can depose him, and I don't think Albert is capable of retiring," he said.
"If he does this, his son will be the ruler, but a regent (acting ruler) will be appointed, someone like Princess Caroline, Albert's older sister. But I don't see that happening. And it's not like the citizens of Monaco are going to break out in rebellion against the prince."
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