Truss given £15k by billionaire pal of Prince Andrew to help fund comeback bid

11 February 2023 , 20:12

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Liz Truss has launched her political comeback (Image: PA)

Liz Truss has enlisted a billionaire pal of scandal-hit Prince Andrew to help pay for her political comeback.

Johan Eliasch, a staunch defender of the Duke of York, has given her £15,000 to pay for staff and to support her work.

Forced to quit as PM after just 44 days in October, Ms Truss launched her political return last week.

Despite the turmoil her unfunded tax cuts created, she moaned that she was “not given a realistic chance to enact my policies by a very powerful political economic establishment.”

But her radical attempt to revive the economy did the exact opposite.

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Johan Eliasch (centre) pictured with Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson in 2019 (Getty Images)

Liz Truss making her final address to the nation in Downing Street in October (Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)

The mini-budget sent shockwaves through the markets - hugely hiking the cost of borrowing - and the UK exchange rate plummeted. The Resolution Foundation later estimated she and then Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng had cost Britain £30 billion.

Ms Truss has now revealed that her comeback is in part funded by sports tycoon Eliasch, a close friend of Prince Andrew’s for more than 20 years.

Eliasch, an ex-Tory Party deputy treasurer, stood up for Andrew as he became tangled in the Jeffrey Epstein scandal.

New details show he donated £15,000 to Ms Truss in two payments of £7,500 - on January 5 and January 25.

In the South West Norfolk MPs’ ­financial interests register, she said it was “for staff and office costs to support me with policy”.

Eliasch has been a long-standing friend of Prince Andrew and famously invited him to Thailand more than 20 years ago where he was photographed with topless women on a yacht. It also emerged that the pair had both been directors of the non-trading company Naples Gold between 2003 and 2021.

Jeffrey Epstein died in jail (New York State Sex Offender Regi)

Ghislaine Maxwell with Jeffrey Epstein

The Duke used the name Andrew Inverness to disguise his involvement.

In 2019 after US sex offender Epstein died in jail, Mr Eliasch defended Andrew in the New York Times.

He insisted: “Anybody who knows the Duke well knows he is intensely loyal to his friends and sometimes that is not in his best interest. That happened here.”

In 2011, amid controversy over the Duke’s decision to visit Epstein in New York, Mr Eliasch was one of several business leaders who signed a letter to the Sunday Times praising “the good work he [Andrew] undertakes”.

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Mr Eliasch was also a director of the Prince’s Dragons’ Dens style initiative Pitch@Palace but stepped down in 2021.

A spokesman for Ms Truss declined to comment.

Andrew Buckwell