Inside the ‘dangerous’ spending scandal rocking Monaco palace

The malice at the palace has reached Defcon 1.

A scandal that’s been simmering since 2021 — involving the most powerful people in the postage stamp-sized principality of Monaco, including Prince Albert, his one-time trusted “Gang of 4,” a shrewd real estate developer and now Princess Charlene — has taken a turn for the worse.

The Grimaldi family’s once-mighty and respected accountant, Claude Palmero, was unceremoniously ousted last year from his perch at the pink palace high above the Mediterranean, after 22 years of service to Albert. He succeeded his own father who served as the late Prince Rainier’s accountant.

He’s now taking out his revenge in spectacular fashion.

It’s a story that could’ve come from one of the Alfred Hitchcock film noirs that Prince Albert’s mother, the late Princess Grace, starred in: Palmero, 67, gave five black notebooks containing detailed notes about decades of palace financial secrets and shenanigans to France’s most respected newspaper, Le Monde.

The resulting four-part series — with sinister headlines like “The Fall of the Man Who Knew Too Much” — shines an embarrassing light on 65-year-old Prince Albert’s professional and personal foibles. Among them are his demand for a second, secret bachelor apartment after his 2011 marriage to former Olympic swimmer Charlene Wittstock and the allocation of up to $650,000 annually in “special funds” for “secret missions” and “parallel activities.”

Those “secret missions” included paying some police officers retainers for “useful information” and for “recovering compromising photos.”

In a separate interview with French newspaper Libération, Palmero added that Albert kept a secret account at a French bank, under the initials AG, to secretly pay his former mistresses and their children.

Until now, Albert’s sometimes-estranged wife, Charlene, 46, has been portrayed as an enigmatic but fragile and troubled princess. But Palmero’s notebooks also paint her as a spendthrift who, as of December 2019, had gone through more than $16 million in eight years.

 “These practices are dangerous,” Palmero wrote in one of his notebooks.“It’s crazy! I have no control over the princess’s spending.”

Albert is reportedly worth between $1 and $1 billion as the current head of the House of Grimaldi, which has ruled Monaco since 1160. According to the notebooks, Charlene receives an annual allowance of about $1.6 million, but her husband also regularly gave her additional payments, including a $650,000 payout in 2017 “to pay off her overdraft.”

“They are really out to get her,” a 35-year resident of Monaco who knows Princess Charlene personally told The Post, referring to what she said were both palace courtiers and some powerful Monegasques. “She didn’t play ball the way she was supposed to and they’ve had it with her. No one ever really liked her — she has a cold personality — but now the knives are really out.”

Palmero also wrote at length in the notebooks about Charlene’s questionable spending habits, which he said included hiring illegal migrant nannies without proper visas or passport as part of her eight-person staff — and paying them as little as $100 per day.

After the 2014 birth of Albert and Charlene’s twins, Gabriella and Jacques, they were placed in the care of illegal immigrant nannies, according to the notebooks.

“‘Her Serene Highness the Princess makes people work for her who are not compliant,” Palmero warned Prince Albert. He also cited “a moonlighting Filipino woman who ties up dogs in the shower.”

Another time, Palmero wrote: ‘Update on the hiring of nannies … We are completely illegal (even their tourist visa expired on January 7) … They are not only in an illegal situation, but one entered with a false passport.”

“Monaco has always been wall-to-wall scandals. And with so many explosive stories that just mysteriously suddenly went quiet, the secret payoffs are not really all that unexpected,” Allison Coe, a longtime French Riviera-based writer who has a blog that includes a focus on Monaco, told The Post.

“With all the money that flies around that little principality, I don’t think anybody here is really all that shocked, except of course the bit about the underpaid undocumented household staff.That’s pretty awkward. What really has everyone bemused, however, is how it all came out… talk about spilling the tea. It’s schadenfreude!” Coe added. “Everyone loves to see 1% get their comeuppance, and in Monaco it is usually in the most spectacular way possible.”

The spurned Palmero lost a power struggle between Albert’s advisers and Monaco’s most powerful real estate developer, Patrice Pastor, in a fight over the principality’s ultra-lucrative property market last spring after a mysterious online site called “Les Dossiers du Rocher” — the Rock Files — began exposing what it claims are the corrupt secrets of Albert’s inner circle. The accusations include money laundering.

The site has accused Palmero, Albert’s chief of staff Laurent Anselmi, the prince’s attorney and childhood friend Thierry Lacoste, and the president of Monaco’s Supreme Court, Didier Linotte, of fraud, cronyism and corruption as well as undue influence on Monaco’s rich real estate and property market.

All four men have denied any involvement in the alleged corruption and filed official complaints after the Dossiers du Rocher website began leaking their information.

Many close to that so-called “Gang of 4” believe it was Pastor, the scion of the uber-influential Pastor real estate empire, who was behind the data dump of their hacked emails and bank records in the dossiers. Pastor has denied it and now seems to have gained the confidence of Prince Albert himself.

“This is all the final proof that the emperor has no clothes,” said Robert Eringer, who worked for Albert as an intelligence adviser from 2002 to 2007 in Monaco. He added that he warned the prince about Palmero, Lacoste and the others not looking out for his best interests way back then.

“Albert’s to blame for the soup he finds himself in now,” Eringer, who has his own blog where he writes about the Grimaldis, told The Post.

“Monaco is at war all the time.  Palmero was deeply entrenched in the factional warfare.  What I was doing for Albert was being the honest broker pointing out these warring factions. I looked at them as cancer cells, and I think I was the first one to blow the whistle on Palmero. But he fired me instead. Albert has a hard time with confrontation. He runs away from it.”

The secret notebooks also give more than a glimpse into the money paid to Albert’s legitimate and illegitimate relatives.

Albert’s sisters, Princess Caroline and Princess Stephanie, get yearly allowances of $780,000 and $690,000 respectively, according to what Le Monde published about the notebooks. Princess Charlene’s brother Sean Wittstock, 41, was given about $800,000 to buy a house.

Prince Albert has been generous with his 31-year-old daughter, Jazmin Grace Grimaldi. Her mother Tamara Rotolo, a former waitress who had a brief fling with Albert, long fought for Albert to acknowledge Jazmin as his own, even ambushing him at public events.

It paid off. Jazmin, who has been dating Ian Mellencamp, the nephew of John Mellencamp, since at least 2016, lives with him in a $3 million Tribeca apartment Albert bought for her six years ago.

Jazmin, who had a bit part in “The Marvelous Mrs Maisel,” also has a small role in John Mellencamp’s new musical, which is currently being workshopped in NYC, called “Small Town: The Story of Jack and Diane.”

She receives an annual allowance of about $344,000, according to the notebooks. So does her half-brother, Alexandre Grimaldi-Coste, 20, whose mother is a Togo-born former flight attendant Nicole Coste.

Alexandre and Nicole are seen frequently at the palace but the notebooks revealed bad blood between Nicole and Charlene.

Nicole was “en route” to cost the palace $850,000 a year in 2015, Palermo warned Albert, according to the notebooks. She was then given another $350,000 and decamped to London where Albert bought an apartment for her. However, he put the property in Alexandre’s name because Nicole reportedly foresaw “big problems” with Charlene if Albert died.

In addition to dishing dirt on the Grimaldi family (they are Serene Highnesses, not royal), Palmero is also suing his former employer for $1 million and has angrily refuted claims from the palace that he stole money.

“I never took a cent,” Palmero told Le Monde. “This is a 100 per cent denial. I am neither corrupt nor a thief, all improbable things of which the princely family, for whom I devoted myself for two decades, unjustly accuses me today.”

Prince Albert responded in a statement that ” the attacks that [Palmero] makes against me and against the state [of Monaco] and its institutions show his true nature and the little respect … he has for the family and the principality.”

Eringer told The Post that, as bad as all the revelations appear to be, Albert’s reign is assured pretty much no matter what.

“There’s no authority who can oust him, and I don’t think Albert is capable of stepping down,” he said. “If he did, his son would be the ruler but there would be a regent appointed, someone like Princess Caroline. But I don’t see that happening. And its not as if the citizens of Monaco are going to stage a revolt.”