‘Hard up’ Andrew may turn to family and friends to help pay settlement

The size of Prince Andrew's settlement with Virginia Giuffre may be undisclosed but lawyers say it is certain to run into the millions, with estimates ranging from £5m to £14m.

Such eye-watering figures have prompted calls for the source of the funds to be made public amid suggestions that the Queen will have to bail out her son.

Andrew is known to be trying to sell his £17m ski chalet in Verbier, Switzerland, but it is understood to be heavily mortgaged and the net proceeds are unlikely to cover the cost of the settlement.

Andrew's only publicly known regular income was a £249,000-a-year allowance from the Queen to fund his Buckingham Palace office while undertaking royal duties. He would also have a small pension from his time serving with the Royal Navy, a job he left in 2001.

Now, with no royal duties to perform, it is not known what, if anything, he receives from his mother.

Sunninghill Park, Andrew's former marital home in Windsor, was bought in 2007 by Timor Kulibayev, the son-in-law of the president of Kazakhstan, for £15m - £3m more than the asking price. Since 2004, Andrew and his ex-wife, Sarah Ferguson, have lived together at Royal Lodge, a Grade II-listed house in Windsor Great Park that is a former residence of the Queen Mother.

A spokesperson for Kulibayev said it was a "commercial, arm's length transaction" using "entirely legitimate" funds.

David McClure, the author of The Queen's True Worth: Unravelling the public and private finances of Queen Elizabeth II, said Andrew did not have sufficient resources for the settlement and would have to turn to his mother for help, though favours from wealthy friends should not be ruled out either.

"The very fact he's down to selling the chalet does indicate that he's not mega wealthy. He wouldn't be selling it if he was mega wealthy," McClure said. "[As for] other sources of revenue - more than likely he's got his own portfolio of private shares. Given his lifestyle, given the financiers he mixes with, it would be amazing if he didn't have his own portfolio of shares."

If the Queen is pitching in to help her son, it would not be the first time: she reportedly helped Prince Charles with his £17m divorce settlement with Diana, Princess of Wales in 1997.

The Queen's main source of funding is revenue from her semi-private estate, the Duchy of Lancaster, which brought her £23m last year and about £20m annually in previous years. "It is her cash cow," McClure said. "She uses it for private income, she's 95, so I don't think she's short of a bob or two."

He said this would be a good use of the money "to stop all the reputational damage that the Giuffre case threatened to bring if it had gone to court in the US. Of course it's a bad case insofar that somewhere along the line the Queen might have to fork out X million, but that's far better than having all the reputational damage that could come from a year-long drib and drab of damaging information about the royal family, and specifically about Andrew."

"One of the reason he was hanging around unsavoury characters like [Jeffrey] Epstein and [Ghislaine] Maxwell was because he's always been attracted to the lifestyle of people wealthier than he is. That was obviously his downfall in this case."

Bates said it was unlikely Andrew could turn to his ex-wife for help. "Sarah has been perennially short of money, which is why she's got into all sorts of scrapes, so she's not in a position, even if she wanted to, to find that sort of money," he said. "But they do have rich friends. The question is how salubrious some of those friends are."

Another royal expert said it was likely the public would never know what contribution, if any, came from the Queen.

Joe Little, the managing editor of Majesty magazine, said: "If we are clear that it is coming from a private source, albeit the Queen, then it's no burden to the taxpayer. I think perhaps that needs to be underlined.

"The figures are pretty transparent nowadays. The Queen has a private income which she uses to support various members of her family, so if that's the case then so be it. Who else is going to support him other than the Queen?"

Wherever the cash comes from, McClure was adamant the source and value should be made public. "There's so much public interest round the world, it's a major story, Andrew is a public figure - you may argue as of last month he's been stripped of his titles, but he's still linked to the palace.

"It's totally legitimate that the palace and its lawyers or the American lawyers give some indication as to the size of the cash settlement."