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From handling money to protecting his image, Claude Palmero was a key member of the billionaire’s inner sanctum – but he wasn’t untouchable
Somerset Maugham famously described it as “a sunny place for shady people”. Mention Monaco to the average man or woman on the street and they will think of two things: blackjack players sitting in palatial casinos sipping champagne, and oligarchs and tycoons sheltering their billions from the tax man.
Push them further and they might also mention the country’s “playboy” monarch, Prince Albert II, who has been beset by paternity claims despite being married to his South African wife, Princess Charlene, since 2011.
Now a new controversy concerning Prince Albert’s former financial advisor has engulfed the royal family. Smooth-talker, money manager, fixer; from 2001 to 2023, Claude Palmero oversaw the royal budget for Prince Albert just as his father, André, had done for Prince Rainier 20 years before him. Through decades of family loyalty, Palmero had earned the prestigious but unofficial position of being right-hand man to the son of Grace Kelly.
For years, Palmero was in charge of every detail of the estate. He managed the royal family’s financial affairs, their properties, their investments, looked after the main palace, their image and the press. He was also tasked with less straightforward assignments. In 2012, he claimed he oversaw “Mission K”, which involved paying off a woman who allegedly had compromising photographs of Prince Albert.
All the while, he kept detailed records of the comings and goings of the Prince and his family’s spending habits.
But last Wednesday, he was brought into a Monaco police station and questioned by officers for four hours, from 9am until 1pm, because of a “a breach of secrecy”. A series of scandalous allegations about the royal family, taken from his “secret” notebooks, had appeared in the French press in January, following Palmero’s shock dismissal from the palace a few months before.
At 68, Palmero is a bespectacled character, with mousy hair and modest grey suits. Rarely photographed, he prefers to keep out of the limelight. He is, according to insiders, a serious man of few words who enjoys holidays in Albania and drives a beaten-up grey Renault Clio. “In Monaco, everyone is in Rolls-Royces, Jaguars and Mercedes,” says one source. “Only Claude Palmero has an old car.”
“He is very restrained, serious and private. Despite his wealth, he is extremely low-key,” agrees Eilidh Hargreaves, features director of Tatler magazine, who has investigated Monaco’s elite. He is, according to Le Monde, comfortably a millionaire. When he worked for the principality, he received a fixed monthly salary of €12,000, to which he added his earnings as a partner in the auditing firm PwC – €1 million a year – plus, for a time, income from his chartered accountancy practice, along with his inheritance from his father.
“The state of his office at the Prince’s Palace said a lot,” says Hargreaves. “It was a spartan room with a huge desk, pencils, three armchairs and a two-metre-high safe. He did not, I was told, appreciate one colleague at the Prince’s Palace joking that this might be where the skeletons were kept. Conversely, Albert had taken over his mother’s old office and turned it into an unnavigable mess of paper stacks, photographs and cups. To me, that says a lot about their conflicting personalities.”
And Prince Albert and Palmero are certainly very different. Albert is the regal but floundering prince, a seemingly reluctant public figure who has existed in front of cameras his whole life. “Prince Albert has been described to me by multiple friends and some of his former team as extremely kind, someone that will do anything to please the women in his life, and shy,” says Hargreaves. “But he is so nervous that he often shakes or stutters in interviews.” In contrast, Palmero lives out of the limelight, is physically unassuming but “very intelligent”, according to insiders. And by no means unsure of himself or the power he wielded.
Before his dismissal as Prince Albert’s financial advisor, Palmero’s influence over Monaco was extensive. Albert is collectively valued at £1 billion, making up 11.5 per cent of Monaco’s £8 billion GDP. He owns about a quarter of the land he reigns over, according to GoBankingRates, making the Monaco royal family one of the wealthiest in the world.
Yet, despite overseeing the finances of such a great estate, Palmero’s power was not infallible. In 2021, a website called Les Dossiers du Rocher (The Rock Files) popped up and suggested there was widespread corruption in Monaco’s royal household.
It exposed leaked emails between Prince Albert and four of his closest advisors – known as the “G4” – including Palmero, chief of staff Laurent Anselmi, Prince Albert’s lawyer Thierry Lacoste and the president of the supreme court Didier Linotte. The website claimed that the four had joined forces to manipulate the property market in Monaco (known colloquially as “the Rock”), which all four vehemently deny, saying the documents were fake.
“Three years ago, someone decided to dirty the name of Claude Palmero,” his lawyer, Marie-Alix Canu-Bernard, tells The Telegraph. “At the beginning, the Prince said to Palmero, ‘OK, I want to help you, it’s horrible, they are lying. I know that you are clean.’ And two years later, the Prince says, ‘I am fed up of all these stories, and I want you to go away.’”
On June 6 2023, Palmero was handed a letter by Prince Albert, who told him that he had to leave the palace. “He took a lot of documents to continue to work at his house, because the Prince asked him, and he took four or five boxes to put papers in,” says Canu-Bernard.”[The newspapers] said he was escorted out by the guard, but he was not,” she adds, explaining that the guard helped him to carry the boxes out to his car. “The guard had worked under Claude Palmero for 20 years, so he said, ‘Ok boss, we’ll help you.’”
Though Prince Albert had initially backed Palmero in the wake of The Rock Files, he changed his mind and dismissed each of the G4. In response to the allegations, he told the Telegraph: “When questions arise, you need to know how to change the people who surround you to find the right path again and to write a new page in your history… If confidence evaporates, you can no longer work together.” He told Monaco-Matin, the local newspaper, that the allegations, though untrue, aired by The Rock Files and then repeated by French media outlets had been “disastrous for Monaco’s image”.
“It was horrible,” says Canu-Bernard, Palmero’s lawyer. “Palmero loved his job. It was his life, in fact. His life was Monaco; it was the Prince, the Prince’s family, helping and doing everything he could to protect them.” She adds: “It was very sudden. He felt completely depressed… it was incomprehensible.” Palmero, she says, is lucky to have a family, because “if he was alone, I think he would not be with us.”
Critics of Prince Albert speculated that he had changed his mind to engage in a “clean hands operation”, getting rid of any further traces of scandal.
Palmero responded to his sacking by bringing a legal case against Prince Albert, citing “immense moral damage, injury and disruption to living conditions”. He contested his dismissal before a tribunal, eventually escalating his case to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), arguing that it was impossible to get a fair hearing in the principality. The case is still ongoing.
And in January 2024, excerpts from five secret notebooks compiled during Palmero’s long service at the palace, were published in the French newspapers Le Monde and Le Libération. The contents sounded like the plot of a salacious thriller.
They claimed that Princess Charlene, Albert’s wife, had an eye for luxury, spending well beyond her already substantial allowance of €1.5 million a year. She is alleged to have spent over €1.6 million on decorating and renovation alone, splashing out €860,00 for an office renovation and a further €827,000 on their Corsican holiday villa. Palmero estimates she spent €15 million in her first eight years of marriage to the prince.
On top of this, the Princess was using “illegal migrants” as staff at the palace, including “a moonlighting Filipino who ties up dogs in the shower”, Palmero claimed. The nannies she hired for her children were “completely illegal … they are not only [illegal], one entered with a false passport”.
Albert’s lawyer Jean-Michel Darrois told Le Monde: “At the palace, Mr Palmero was solely responsible for human resources and recruitment. The Prince does not intervene in such matters.” He also insisted that any form of overspending by family members was swiftly dealt with. “From the moment Claude Palmero informed [the Prince] of such an overrun, he was instructed to have them fully covered by the family’s private assets.”
But the biggest tabloid stir arose on the subject of Albert’s children. Albert had a French bank account that he used to fund his former mistress and his children, money that was paid unbeknownst to his wife, the notebooks alleged. Palmero claimed he paid €344,000 annually to Albert’s two acknowledged love-children: 32-year-old Jazmin Grimaldi, whose mother, Tamara Rotolo, is an estate agent, and 21-year-old Alexandre Coste-Grimaldi, born to the former air hostess Nicole Coste. Ransom money was also set-aside for Coste-Grimaldi, although it hasn’t been made clear why he above the other children was considered to be a likely kidnap risk.
Every unbroken, unspoken secret between the previously loyal Palmero and the Prince had seemingly been laid bare. To this day, Palmero’s lawyer denies that he gave the contents of the notebooks to the press, saying that police raided his house following his dismissal, and they were taken away from July to August. “We don’t know who read those notebooks during that month and a half,” she says.
“It is important to remember that Palmero maintains that he didn’t give the notebooks to anyone; and the journalists from Le Monde told me that they procured them from ‘a source who works in justice’”, says Hargreaves regarding this latest scandal. “One diplomat who lives there told me, the people are ‘used to this sort of thing, there’s always scandal in Monaco.’”
“What is shocking this time around is the proximity of the fallout to the Prince, and the intimate alleged details about his spending and family life that the notebooks have revealed,” she adds. “As Prince of Monaco, Albert is not a good person to fall out with: unlike King Charles III, he is both head of state and government and is therefore socially and politically very powerful.” The Prince’s Palace of Monaco declined to comment.
Since Palmero’s dismissal, Albert has made several changes to his inner circle, including appointing new judicial and security chiefs. But conflict is still on the horizon for Monaco, as a legal standoff between the camps of Palmero and Grimaldi continues in court.
For now, Palmero works as a freelance financial consultant in Monaco, feeling “deceived” and “confused” about his dismissal from the palace. The last time he heard from Albert was July 2023.
The quiet, loyal financial advisor remains determined to “restore his honour”, says his lawyer. His ultimate mission, she adds, is to return to the palace. And if there’s one place where such a comeback is within reach, it’s the secretive, shrouded Rock of Monaco.