MONACO'S PALACE ACCOUNTANT BOOTED BY PRINCE ALBERT II
Claude Palmero was Principality's Most Corrupt Courtier
Seven weeks ago, on April 15th, I wrote in the Santa Barbara News-Press (posted on Substack) about the corruption of Palace administrator Claude Palmero and his co-conspirator, Thierry Lacoste, Prince Albert’s personal lawyer.
Yesterday morning Palmero received a hand-delivered letter from Prince Albert dismissing him from his duties and demanding his immediate departure from the Palace.
Palmero, 67, was escorted to his car by the Prince’s carabinieri.
Here is the problem: The Prince learned of Palmero’s corruption directly from me, his intelligence chief, 16 YEARS AGO!
So why did Albert wait so long to boot Palmero’s butt?
Not because Palmero was corrupt (which in Monaco is the norm) but because he got caught.
Palmero’s emails were hacked and posted on the internet, the extent of his corruption was made clear for all to see and, as Nice-Matin reported today, such exposure was “Disastrous for the image of Monaco.”
I am informed by sources close to the matter that more fallout is expected as Prince Albert strives to distance himself from a huge scandal in which he, himself, is complicit because he knew these crimes were being perpetrated as far back as 2007 and did nothing to stop them.
Here is what I posted on 15 April:
CORRUPTION AT THE HIGHEST LEVEL
I have already written in an earlier column, Putin’s Pet Principality, that Prince Albert’s embracement of Russia’s Vladimir Putin was the seminal event leading to my dismantling of the intelligence service I created for the Prince.
But there was another issue that played a role in my departure and it was an internal scandal pertaining to a pair of Albert’s closest advisers/scoundrels: Paris-based lawyer Thierry Lacoste and the Palace accountant Claude Palmero.
Both are terribly corrupt.
Our service, working closely with Monaco’s police department, caught the pair of them red-handed. Lacoste and Palmero were in cahoots with one another to enrich themselves at Monaco’s expense.
This is how these dirty-dealing sore losers became big winners.
Monaco’s government had much earlier invited blue-chip vendors to bid for the construction of the Larvotto Project, a land reclamation project off Monte Carlo’s beach to build habitable space upon the sea. This project was similar to what Monaco had achieved decades earlier in a suburban spinoff called Fontvieille.
These vendors paid millions of euros in fees just to formulate their bids and become part of the selection process.
Except for one, none of the vendors knew that the odds were heavily stacked against them from the get-go.
How so?
Because Lacoste and Palmero had made secret deals to become silent partners with one of the vendors, the Marzocco-Schriqui-Vinci consortium, in exchange for using their influence to rig the winning bid their way. And when Marzocco-Schriqui-Vinci got ruled out in the final round, Lacoste and Palmero convinced the Prince to terminate the Larvotto project altogether on the basis that it was bad for the environment.
However, from the beginning, all vendors were required to innovate the land reclamation into an environmental showcase—an example to the world of how modern construction can be executed without negative ecological impact. And they did just that.
Thus, the official reason for cancelling the project was bogus and these vendors had wasted their time and money.
A Palace insider told us back then: “They [Lacoste and Palmero] plan to resurrect the Larvotto project in a few years’ time, start fresh and get another shot at winning the bid.”
And, years later, that is precisely what happened.
Monaco’s own police department confirmed this arrangement to us having discovered the corruption while investigating Marzocco-Schriqui’s funding. They determined that this funding had derived from a Russian mafia figure—an ethnic Korean from Kazakhstan named Oleg Davidovic Kim.
Kim, we then discovered, had falsified a Letter of Credit from the Bank of Tokyo. The bank's senior representatives affirmed to investigators that their bank never issued such a guarantee and that their signatures were forged. Yet with this letter of credit Kim managed to borrow $55 million from the Krasnoyarsk Aluminum Plant.
The Russian who arranged this “short-term” loan was Yuri Kolpakov. According to sources in the Russian government, investigators believe Kim then "ordered the killing" of Kolpakov in retaliation for pursuing the unpaid $55 million loan and for reporting Kim to the authorities.
We reported the corruption and sourcing to Prince Albert. (Monaco police reporting was repeatedly obstructed by Monaco’s interior ministry and consequently never reached the Palace, which is why our intelligence service was invaluable to Albert—and should have remained so.)
Thereafter, Thierry Lacoste and Claude Palmero conspired to disrupt the flow of intelligence to the Prince—and Albert ultimately chose to take the path of least resistance by allowing his lawyer and accountant to run roughshod through his principality.
Sadly, corruption in Monaco has steadily grown much worse since then.
Truth so often prevails. And indeed all these years later the rampant corruption of Messieurs Lacoste and Palmero was recently exposed by their own emails, which got hacked and posted onto a website called Dossiers Les Rocher.
Vincit omnia veritas.
Palmero’s corruption was well known for years. He used to manage the funds of the International School of Monaco together with Gerard Cohen and when asked for explanations of the annual accounts during general meetings they were usually vague and not transparent, would never address the questions asked and they both were suspected of ilicitly benefiting from the school funds. Glad he was finally caught, Karma. Now it is Mr Cohen’s turn maybe.