Princess Charlene may find the golden shackles that come with royal life difficult, but she apparently has no difficulty dipping into the palace treasury, spending an eye-watering $25 million in just eight years.
This is just one of the sensational claims Prince Albert’s former accountant has made about the 46-year-old South African former swimmer’s “dangerous spending” habits, after he was unceremoniously sacked last year after 22 years of service, following allegations of financial impropriety at the palace.
“I am neither corrupt nor a thief, all the improbable things of which the royal family, to whom I devoted myself for two decades, unjustly accuses me today,” former royal accountant Claude Palermo last week told French newspaper Le Monde.
He is suing the royal family for $1.6 million, but even more damaging, he has released five secret black notebooks detailing Albert and Charlene’s outrageous spending, including millions said to have been paid to Albert’s illegitimate children from relationships he had before he married.The accountant claims that the palace splashed out almost $5 million for a New York apartment for Jazmin Grace Grimaldi, 31, on top of the $600,000 allowance she gets each year.
Her half-brother Alexandre Grimaldi-Coste, 20, is insured for kidnapping and ransom, and also gets a $600,000 annual allowance.
His mum Nicole is said to get a whopping $1.6 million allowance each year, and all these payments come out of a French bank account Albert keeps to allow him to provide money to his former girlfriends and their children, potentially without Charlene’s knowledge.
Former Air France flight attendant Nicole, 52, also demanded a London apartment for Alexandre, who Albert, 65, formally recognised as his son following DNA tests, because she “fears big problems with Charlene” if Albert dies, the accountant claimed.
While Charlene has spent millions on her wardrobe, lavish trips abroad, redecorating her palace office and Corsican holiday villa, and giving her own family hundreds of thousands of dollars, she appears to be anything but extravagant with her own personal staff.
Palermo claims that most of her eight full-time staff, including the nannies she hired to look after her nine-year-old royal twins, Prince Jacques and Princess Gabriella, were immigrants paid just $160 a day.
Charlene did, however, spend more than $1 million to celebrate the twins’ birth and baptism, and in just one day in 2016 she asked the accountant for $110,000.
He also claims Albert has to continually release funds to Charlene because she can’t live on her $2.5 million allowance.
According to French media, Charlene has even earned herself the nickname “Marie Antoinette of Monaco”.
“During her solo holidays on the island of Corsica, she’d rent a villa with a $500-a-day chef, rental of a catamaran… spending $1.5 million in two and a half months,” tells an insider, adding Charlene gave $1.4 million to her brother Sean Wittstock to help him buy a house.
“It’s crazy. I have no control over the princess’ spending,” the accountant wrote in one of his notebooks.
