The Middleton Family Crisis
New clouds are gathering over the British royal family. And this time, Harry and Meghan Markle have nothing to do with it. According to the latest gossip coming from the UK, it would be Michael and Carole Middleton who would embarrass the Crown gravely. The parents of the Princess of Wales, as we found out last May, were forced to sell the family business with which they had enriched themselves, the Party Pieces specializing in party items, a step away from bankruptcy. The reason? The crisis in the sector unleashed by the pandemic has not spared them either.
Party Pieces Sold
The Party Piece was bought by James Sinclair, CEO of Partyman, through a procedure called pre-pack administration deal that allows an insolvent company to sell and only afterwards to appoint administrators. The amount paid to take over the company has not been made public. In compensation, as the British press reports, the Party Pieces bankruptcy procedure would have revealed that Michael and Carole Middleton sold the company leaving behind a debt of almost three million pounds never reimbursed to creditors and 600,000 pounds of taxes never paid to the tax office. Numbers that, if confirmed, would give a very bad blow to the image of the family of the future queen consort Kate.
Anger of Creditors
For sure, at the moment, only the anger of the creditors of the party items company is certain. Because now they risk not seeing even one pound. According to a report published by the Daily Mail, in fact, “it is not certain that there will be funds available to allow distribution to privileged creditors”. A bitter truth that has unleashed the ire of the creditors of the Middleton family. One of the angriest is Lord Iliffe, the owner of the estate in Berkshire where Kate’s parents had established the company’s headquarters. With him Carole and Michael have a debt of 57,480 pounds, and now they have left him to face “a serious financial consequence”. Another creditor told the Daily Mail that after long discussions with the representatives of the “Party Pieces” he understood that there was no hope of seeing the money again: “The figures of the debts are pale, there is not only the loan for the interruption of the activity due to the coronavirus, there is the VAT and many other things left unresolved”. Furious and bitter also the spokesman of the “Sultani Gas”, the company in Kent that supplied Party Pieces with helium for the balloons: “What hurt me the most is that I trusted Carole Middleton as the future king’s mother-in-law and instead she betrayed me. It is unacceptable”.
