The Sunday Times April 24, 2022 9NEWS
Duchess of York was paid £20,000 to advise firm run by caravan tycoon
received £10,000 from the
Manchester-registered
company.
Alphabet Capital has been
linked in a High Court action
to Selman Turk, an alleged
fraudster and associate of the
Yorks.
Turk is accused of
swindling Nebahat Isbilen,
77, the wife of a wealthy
Turkish MP, out of
£40 million after she hired
him as her financial adviser.
Turk, 35, denies any
wrongdoing.
Alphabet Capital’s NatWest
account is alleged to have
been used as a conduit to
channel some of Isbilen’s
missing funds to various third
parties, including the Yorks.
Court papers state the
payments “give rise to a
strong prima facie case of
fraudulent and/or money
laundering activity”.
The main shareholder andThis month it was alleged
that Turk had instructed
Isbilen to transfer £750,
into Andrew’s Coutts bank
account in November 2019,
just days after Turk was
presented by the duke with
an award at a Dragons’ Den-
style event at St James’s
Palace.
Andrew has since returned
the money to Isbilen.
However, court papers state
that he later received as
much as £350,000 from
Alphabet Capital, allegedly at
the behest of Turk. The duke
has failed to explain what this
money was for and has not
returned it.
Eugenie, 32, also received
two payments totalling about
£25,000 in October 2019. One
sum of £15,000 came from
Turk, while the other
£10,000 was paid by
Alphabet Capital.
The princess has said shethought the money was from
a “long-standing family
friend” who had offered to
pay towards a surprise 60th
birthday party for her
mother. It was immediately
passed on to the party
organisers.
Gleave refused to answer
any questions about his
relationship to Turk or to the
Yorks. An Alphabet Capital
spokesman said: “Allegations
made in the High Court
action about our company
are demonstrably false and as
such the claim will be
vigorously contested.
“Our lawyers have been
instructed to take the
appropriate action against
anyone seeking to damage
our company or its staff
through these false
allegations and insinuations.”
Additional reporting:
Mike Browne and Hannah
Al-OthmanSarah, Duchess of York, acted
as a paid adviser to a finance
company embroiled in
allegations of money
laundering and controlled by
a businessman who runs
caravan parks in Northern
Ireland.
The duchess received
£20,000 from Alphabet
Capital, which for a long time
was listed in Companies
House filings as a dormant
entity without any staff.
The consultancy fee
followed a separate payment
of £225,000 made to the
duchess in mid-2019 by
Alphabet Capital, as well as
up to £350,000 paid in
unexplained instalments by
the same company to her ex-
husband Prince Andrew.
The couple’s daughter,
Princess Eugenie, alsoDipesh Gadher
Home Affairs CorrespondentAdam Sandler has produced nine titles
for the platform since 2015. In October
Netflix launched Baking Impossible, a
competition in which contestants create
sculptures from cake; in March it added
the similar show, Is It Cake?.
A TV executive who has made shows
for the streaming company said: “Netflix
used to be a pick’n’mix, the idea being
that there was something for everybody —
now they increasingly want us all to have
the same taste.” He added that for big-
budget shows, the emphasis was on ones
that attracted sign-ups, rather than those
that kept current subscribers happy:Get past
season three
and the actors
want new
contractsFew new Netflix
shows have been
able to match
the appeal of
hits such as
Breaking Bad,
Mad Men and
House of CardsSettling in for a Netflix binge? Bad
luck, your show’s been cancelled
Rosamund Urwin and
Narottam MedhoraThe streaming giant is dropping more of its own shows much earlier as it struggles to keep costs down and viewers interested
Pegasus, a solar power
company in Las Vegas, for
whom she had worked as a
brand ambassador.
When Pegasus was unable
to pay the money in one
instalment, Turk apparently
stepped in and took on the
debt — although it is unclear
why Alphabet Capital was
chosen as the intermediary
for the duchess, 62, to
receive the money.
The duchess was later paid
a further £20,000 by
Alphabet Capital, via her
company, Planet Partners
Productions. Friends say this
sum relates to a brief period
of time before the pandemic
in which she worked in an
“advisory role” for Alphabet
Capital.
The duchess denies any
wrongdoing, but she refused
to say what this work entailed
or explain her relationship to
Gleave.founding director of
Alphabet Capital is Adrian
Gleave, 51, a businessman
who made his name running
caravan parks and retirement
homes around Bangor in
Northern Ireland before
expanding to several sites in
England.
The company lists its
registered office at the Swan
Buildings business complex
in Manchester city centre. On
Friday there was no evidence
it had ever existed there.
Instead, Gleave works out
of an office at the Seahaven
Residential Park on the
County Down coast. The
venue offers “retirement
living for the over-55s”,
according to its website.
The duchess first received
a sum of £225,000 from
Alphabet Capital in August
2019, according to the High
Court action. Friends says the
sum was owed to her byn
edheIAN WEST/PAALAMY; NETFLIXThe caravan park
entrepreneur Adrian
Gleave is the founding
director of Alphabet
Capital, which
previously gave
£225,000 to Sarah,
Duchess of York“That means shows that are talked about
— so we’re back to that idea of water-
cooler or name-drop TV. The other point
about Netflix is its figures are so opaque;
you can be the producer of a show and
not really know how it has performed.”
Programme makers argue that it is no
longer enough to be performing well in
Netflix’s mature markets such as America
and the UK: shows have to attract new
subscribers in countries where the plat-
form is less saturated.
Rachel Shukert, who created the teen
comedy-drama The Baby-Sitters Club —
which was cancelled by Netflix after two
seasons despite winning awards — told
the Vulture website last month: “They’re
looking to drive subscriber growth in
other parts of the world where this IP
[intellectual property] doesn’t have much
recognition. I feel like Netflix’s internal
metrics can change month to month;
something that was fine three months ago
is suddenly not what they need.”
On its website, the platform says it has
been a “data-driven company since its
inception”. Each week, it runs a list of the
top ten most watched TV and films
around the world. In a letter to a House of
Lords committee, Netflix explained that
it was focused on “completers” — sub-scribers who watch every episode of a
show in the first 28 days after release, in a
similar vein to the fixation of Hollywood
on box-office takings during films’ open-
ing weekends. This puts slow-burning
shows on Netflix at a disadvantage.
The firm said last week that it expected
to lose another two million subscribers in
the second quarter of the year. Its figures
for the first quarter were damaged by the
suspension of its service in Russia, where
it had about 700,000 customers.
Ed Lavery, director of investor intelli-
gence at Similarweb, added that there are
signs subscribers are reducing their use
of Netflix, with the average viewing time
on its Android app falling from about 48
minutes a day last year to 41 minutes now.
Netflix’s struggles reflect the stream-
ing wars, heating up with increased com-
petition from Disney+, Amazon Prime
Video and AppleTV, and subscribers cut-
ting back owing to the cost-of-living crisis.
Reed Hastings, its founder and co-chief
executive, said last week: “We’ve got
great competition, they’ve got some very
good shows and films out, and what
we’ve got to do is take it up a notch.”
The art of saying goodbye, Culture,
pages 12-It is the bane of the Netflix subscriber’s
life: the streaming service has cancelled
their favourite show and they never know
which series will be axed next.
Now analysis has revealed that Netflix
is pulling the plug on its own shows much
earlier than it used to, and the strategy is
thought to be one factor putting subscrib-
ers off the platform. Last week its share
price dropped more than 35 per cent
after it reported that it had lost 200,
subscribers in three months, the first
decline in a decade.
Netflix, which started out sending
DVDs to customers by post, helped make
the “box set binge” a cultural phenome-
non, with subscribers sometimes watch-
ing more than one series of shows such as
Breaking Bad and Mad Men back-to-back.
However, it is becoming rarer for even
Netflix’s own hit shows to last beyond
three seasons, with fewer than one in five
launched in 2017 reaching that milestone
compared with 31 per cent in 2015.
Fans have been surprised by the can-
cellation of high-profile shows including
the fantasy epic Marco Polo and the sci-
ence fiction drama The OA — both axed
after two series — and the thriller Blood-
line, which ended after its third season.
“One of the biggest issues is cost,
because in Hollywood when you get
past season three typically you are in
contract re-negotiation territory with
the actors, crew and cast,” said Cory
Barker, assistant professor of com-
munication at Bradley University in
Illinois, who edited a collection of
critical essays, The Age of Netflix.
“But I think subscribers get
annoyed — there have been some
really high-profile examples,
such as The OA — which wasn’t
necessarily super popular,
but its cancellation provoked
a really passionate response
from fans.”
More than half of Netflix’s
own dramas and reality-TV
shows released in 2018 have not
returned for a second series, compared
with more than a third launched in 2017
and 28 per cent in 2016, according to our
research. These figures also reflect a
move towards limited series, which tell a
complete story in a single season, such as
the recent fraudster biopic, Inventing
Anna. The pandemic also delayed and
complicated filming, contributing to
some cancellations.
When Netflix launched as a platform, it
licensed shows from other studios before
starting to make its own content. Earlyoriginal series included the politi-
cal drama House of Cards and
Orange is the New Black, set in a
women’s prison, which ran for
six and seven seasons, respec-
tively. As its focus on original
programming has increased,
series have been given
less of a chance to build a
large fanbase or develop.
Barker believes that this
is contributing to a sec-
ond issue for the plat-
form: homogenisation
— a feeling among sub-
scribers that a lot of the
content now feels similar, whether in
genre, appearance or tone. “[Netflix]
seems to believe it can cancel a show, cre-
ate a new one in the same genre with ele-
ments that are similar enough to keep
fans of the cancelled show as subscribers
— so prevent churn — but might have
something to appeal to someone who is
not currently a subscriber,” Barker said.
“But the attempt to be everything to
everyone... means there is a lot of samey
content in a huge library that makes you
think, ‘There’s a lot of stuff here, but is
there anything I desperately want to
watch?’”My word slips are due to dyslexia, says Dorries
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think, ‘There’s a lot
there anything I d
watch?’”decade that he had dyslexia
because of fears that it would
derail his career. He is
campaigning for new
legislation that would
mandate universal screening
for dyslexia in schools and
improve training. He has also
urged employers to be more
forgiving of typos when
reading through CVs, arguing
that many jobs today
required creativity over the
ability to spell.
After Hancock, 43, who
resigned as health secretary
after breaching his own
coronavirus guidance, spoke
about his dyslexia on ITV’s
This Morning in December, its
co-host Phillip Schofield was
criticised for asking him:
“Was it your dyslexia that
meant you misread
social-distancing rules?”Anna Soubry, a former
Conservative minister and
the MP for Broxtowe from
2010 to 2019, wrote:
“Brilliant. Nadine Dorries an
early contender for
#wazzockoftheday.”
Several comedians also
published parody videos
impersonating Dorries.
Dorries has previously said
that writing her novels helps
when she is feeling low,
telling Grazia in 2020: “That
is my therapy. But I think it’s
because I’m dyslexic and
dyslexic people are used to
being creative and thinking
out of the box a bit. And I
think that also helps me with
that.”
Matt Hancock, the Tory
former health secretary, said
last month that he had felt
unable to reveal for almost aNadine Dorries has accused
commentators of mocking
her dyslexia after she was
recorded on video telling
people to “downstream”
movies and referring to
tennis courts as “pitches”.
The culture secretary said
yesterday her learning
difficulty meant that she
could find it hard to use the
correct words when
speaking. Dorries, 64, a
bestselling author of
historical fiction who joined
the cabinet in 2020, said her
dyslexia affected her speech
more than her writing.
In a statement on Twitter
she said that sometimes she
found it “funny” and easy to
“laugh it off ” but “mostly, it’sjust difficult”. She added:
“I’m OK with that. I’ve been
in politics a long time and you
grow a thick skin. It’s why I
haven’t spoken publicly
much about how it affects
me. But I’ve found it tough
seeing commentators and
media outlets mock me for
something that is beyond my
control. For other dyslexia
sufferers, we learn that it’s
what you achieve in life that
counts, not what those who
mock you say.”
Dyslexia is a common
learning difficulty that mainly
causes problems with
reading, writing and spelling.
The NHS said that symptoms
could also include difficulty
“pronouncing long words
properly and jumbling up
phrases”.
On Friday Dr Luke Evans,Harry Yorke
Deputy Political Editorthe Conservative MP for
Bosworth, posted a video
online in which Dorries
explained the work
undertaken by her
Department for Digital,
Culture, Media and Sport.
“We’re responsible for
making sure you have
superfast broadband in your
home, that means you can
downstream your movies,”
she said, in an apparent
mix-up with the word
download.
She went on to state that
the department was
“responsible for everything
to do with sport, making sure
you’ve got football pitches
and that you have tennis
pitches in your communities
where you can play and
exercise your sport”.
Responding to the video,6.3m
Number of people in the UK
estimated to have dyslexiaA bestselling
author, Nadine
Dorries says her
dyslexia affects
her speech more
than her writing