London Evening Standard/London
Prince Charles has used his quota of invitations to the royal wedding to reward a string of wealthy friends and benefactors – and even an ex-girlfriend.On his guest list for the wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton are a Kazakh billionaire, a German playboy-turned-art collector whose uncle was in the SS, and the woman rumoured to be his first love, Lucia Santa Cruz.In line with most modern weddings, Charles, as father of the bridegroom, has been allowed to nominate a group of friends for the Westminster Abbey ceremony on April 29 as well as the champagne and canape reception afterwards at Buckingham Palace.Also invited is Jon Zammett, the PR chief at Audi, who provide the royal family with cut-price cars. In 2007, the Mail revealed that Kate had also bagged herself a deal for a new silver A3 coupe.The prince’s guest list makes eye-catching reading, apparently crammed with ‘mega-rich’ foreigners, many of whom have proved to be extremely generous donators to his charitable causes.Among them is Timur Kuanyshev, a Kazakh oil and construction tycoon who counts Prince Michael of Kent among his acquaintances.Kuanyshev, the son of a former leading Soviet figure, has lavished massive sums on British good causes including the Royal Opera House, earning himself and his wife, Alfiya, a place in London society.One wonders, though, whether Charles is aware of the story of how Kuanyshev was allegedly detained by Russian customs officers with his wife and two associates at a Moscow airport with $1,000,000 in undeclared US dollars in their underwear.The money was said to have been a loan meant to be placed in a bank in Kazakhstan but the case never went to court.Another wedding breakfast guest is Juergen Pierburg, the former playboy son of a Nazi industrialist whose factories played a large part in the German war effort and who was on speaking terms with Hitler.Pierburg’s uncle, Kurt Pierburg, was a colonel in the SS and was sentenced to 25 years in jail after the war. As a young man, Pierburg – whose family own the DVG carburettor plants – was famed for his lavish parties, for one of which he flew in Andy Warhol from New York. He is now a billionaire art collector and philanthropist with a a magnificent 30-room schloss in Switzerland.The list also includes two senior figures from Porcelanosa, the Spanish tiling company, which was awarded a Royal Warrant after carrying out extensive work at Charles’s residences Highgrove and Birkhall. The company has donated hundreds of thousands of pounds to his favourite charities and has thrown parties in his honour. The prince has also chosen to invite his Romanian property manager, Count Kalnoky. Charles has bought two buy-to-let properties in Transylvania and Kalnoky, a Romanian aristocrat, oversees the £670-a-week properties for him. He and the prince socialise together during Charles’s annual summer visit to the region.Other guests include Italian aristocrat Marchese Vittorio Frescobaldi, a wine magnate whose family wield immense power in Florence and in the 13th Century held the purse strings of the British monarchy. Over the past five years, the family have been dogged by allegations of a wine label scam, centring on claims that grapes have been imported from outside the Tuscany region. Frescobaldi strongly denies any wrongdoing.