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Lawyers for an aide to Prince Andrew are fighting to prevent his statement in support of a man accused of being a Chinese agent, who briefly became a trusted business partner and associate of the prince, from being released to the press.
The Guardian is leading a group of media organisations seeking the release of a witness statement written by the prince’s fixer and close friend Dominic Hampshire, originally at the personal request of the businessman Yang Tengbo.
The document is described as containing “details of business dealings and relationships” and “highly sensitive” dealings with a UK government agency. The matters within are described by Hampshire as “not something he would ever discuss openly”.
It has become part of proceedings relating to last month’s decision by the immigration tribunal to uphold Yang’s exclusion from the UK – and whether the public can be told about the full contents of a document referred to in the tribunal’s final judgment.
Yang has said previously that the allegations against him are “entirely unfounded” and he is seeking permission to appeal against the tribunal’s decision.
Adam Wolanski KC, for the media, told a special one-day hearing that journalists should be allowed to see Hampshire’s witness statement and other documents referred to in the tribunal’s proceedings on the principle of open justice.
It was normal practice for cited documents to be disclosed to the media because the “public need to understand the issues, and also the evidence”, and Hampshire “must have known” his witness statement could eventually come into the public domain, Wolanski told the tribunal.
Jonathan Price, acting for Hampshire, said the royal fixer had originally thought “his evidence could be dealt with in private” but discovered he could not get a guarantee it would remain confidential. Having been “disabused of that” he “sought to ensure his evidence was not included in the case”.
Price referred to a brief account by Hampshire of how the 34-paragraph witness statement came to be prepared in May 2024 and his subsequent efforts to keep it from the public view because of the “level of confidential detail” it contains.
Hampshire, a former Scots guard and old friend of Andrew, described himself as “senior adviser” to the royal in letters to written Yang in 2020. But on Friday he described himself as “secretary of the Quad-Centenary Club”, a society established to raise funds for London’s Royal Blackheath golf club, for which Andrew was chair.
In one of his letters to Yang, written in March 2020, Hampshire had heaped praise on the businessman for his loyalty to the prince in the aftermath of a disastrous interview with the BBC’s Emily Maitlis the year before. “You sit at the very top of a tree that many, many people would like to be on,” Hampshire said at the time.
The witness statement was provided on the basis it would be sent to James Cleverly, then the home secretary, “to provide some context” to the correspondence, which had been obtained by police from Yang’s mobile phone, Hampshire said on Friday in his account.
“I wrote what I did in the statement with such candour – including about my own confidential commercial interests but also about the private interests of third parties – in the expectation it was for the private attention of one of the most senior ministries of state on a grave matter,” he added.
Yang’s lawyers then told him they wanted the document to form part of the businessman’s immigration appeal. “I agreed, following assurances from Mr Yang’s legal team that they had every confidence their application to have the session heard in private would be successful,” Hampshire said.
However, “when I was informed by Mr Yang’s legal team that they had been unsuccessful” Hampshire said he told them: “I did not wish to give evidence and did not want my witness statement to be used, or relied upon, in any part of the proceedings.”
Though Yang’s legal team agreed not to refer it to in their case, the document remained part of the bundle, or legal papers, lodged with the tribunal – and Wolanski told Friday’s hearing that it was cited by the tribunal in its judgment last month.
The tribunal noted that Cleverly “now has the benefit of Mr Hampshire’s witness statement” and that, after a review, the original decision to exclude Yang made by Cleverly’s predecessor, Suella Braverman, “has been maintained”.
A second letter from Hampshire dated October 2020 said Yang was authorised to act on behalf of an investment scheme in China involving the prince called the Eurasia fund. Further details about the operation of fund and information “identifying individuals as potential associates,” have also been redacted from documents disclosed to the media so far. Those redactions are being challenged by the Guardian.
Members of the immigration tribunal will rule on whether the documents sought can be disclosed and redactions lifted at a later date.
