As the controversy has swirled over his dubious friendships, Prince Andrew has maintained a stubborn silence. That one of the first people to leap to his defence should be a spectacularly rich, British-educated Kazakh siren, who mixes with royals, media tycoons and the hardest-partying European social butterflies, sheds light on power, influence and wealth in Britain.
To all but the most devoted readers of society magazines, Goga Ashkenazi rose without trace. Then suddenly she was ubiquitous, waging a one-woman glitzkrieg that has taken her all the way to meeting the Queen at Ascot and a closeness to the Duke of York that enabled her to claim yesterday that he was “very, very worried”, but should not lose his job because “Britain is very lucky to have him”.
The paparazzi, meanwhile, are lucky to have Ms Ashkenazi, possibly the most glamorous 31-year-old woman ever to have claimed to have made a fortune from mining in Kazakhstan.
“She turns up everywhere, Zelig-like,” says one society journalist, referring to the human chameleon character in a Woody Allen film.
Here she is with Kevin Spacey; giggling with Elle Macpherson; flashing her dazzling smile with Nick Candy the property developer to the super-rich; posing with the über-PR man Matthew Freud; chatting with Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie.
Advertisement
One of those whose parties she does not miss is Alexander Lebedev, the Russian billionaire, ex-spy and owner of The Independent newspaper and the London Evening Standard, which interviewed Ms Ashkenazi, not for the first time, yesterday.
On a balmy evening last summer she attended the annual dinner of the Raisa Gorbachev Foundation, set up in 2006 after the death from leukaemia of the wife of the former Russian President.
Mr Lebedev, the cancer charity’s main benefactor, hosts the party at Stud House, his home in the park of Hampton Court Palace. Guests such as Vanessa Redgrave, Anjelica Huston, Patrick Cox and Yasmin Le Bon paid £1,500 a head to enjoy performances from operatic soprano Anna Netrebko and Bryan Ferry.
Wearing a black-lace Valentino dress, Ms Ashkenazi chatted happily to Hugh Grant before taking her place at a table for ten friends she had secured for £15,000.
She lost in the auction to spend an afternoon with Kevin Spacey, but diamonds, luxury holidays and works by Jeff Koons and Francis Bacon were also auctioned for the charity.
Advertisement
Mikhail Gorbachev, who was there, is a family friend. Ms Ashkenazi’s father, Erkin, was a senior Communist party figure in Kazakhstan before becoming an agricultural adviser in Moscow, reporting directly to Mr Gorbachev.
“My father wrote speeches for Gorbachev,” Ms Ashkenazi recalled recently. “We were quite high up. The state provided cars and plane rides, drivers, nannies and cooks. We lived very well.”
She was introduced to Prince Andrew in 2001 by Robert Hanson, a financier who is a trustee of the foundation. Mr Hanson also gave the speech at Ms Ashkenazi’s 30th birthday party last year.
Ms Ashkenazi came from a prosperous background but it is not quite clear how she has become so fabulously wealthy. Her parents could afford to educate her in Britain. She went first to Stowe, which she left after being caught with a boy in her room. She took her A levels at Rugby and then went to Somerville College, Oxford, where she got a Third in history and ecomomics. She took a First in partying, much of it away from Oxford.
When she did stay at home to revise, leaving her boyfriend, Dino Lalvani, of the Binatone electronics company, to attend Naomi Campbell’s birthday party without her, she lost him (though she’s not sure to whom). Still, Formula 1’s Flavio Briatore had been sending her bouquets so she moved into his yacht once her finals were out of the way.
Advertisement
After a fling with him she went back to Mr Lalvani and claims that Briatore says that she is the only girl who ever dumped him.
Aged 23, she met Stefan Ashkenazi, the American scion of a hotel group. She said in an interview that he was “Amazing. Too good for me, for sure.” They married in 2004, separated in 2006 and divorced a year later.
She had been spending a lot of time building her business in Kazakhstan. She has said that she and her sister, Meruert, built their companies, including engineering and construction concerns, by themselves. She has denied she was helped by Timur Kulibayev, the Kazakh president’s son-in-law, by whom she has a son.
“It has nothing to do with Timor,” she told an interviewer. “Of course, it’s the easiest thing to assume that a young person can never become successful unless she’s having sex with somebody. But I’m just very lucky is all I can say, being there at the right time and the right place.”
She has said: “I’m nouveau, nouveau, nouveau riche.”
Advertisement
She said last year that she would consider another marriage but it was not easy. “I can’t quite marry someone drastically poorer than me, so that already rules out a lot of people. Men will never forgive you for your success unless you’re less successful than they are and then they put you down.”
She explained also that the pool of potential mates was also diminished by the fact that men under 40 were too immature and those over 50 too boring. She has been linked to various men including the actor Gerard Butler and, of course, Prince Andrew.
An interview with ES Magazine last year reported that she had a picture of her and the Prince on her phone, wrapped in towels outside a sauna in Kazakhstan. She denied yesterday that they have ever been romantically involved.
She certainly knows how to enjoy her wealth and is unencumbered by coyness when it comes to flaunting and talking about it.
She is ferried between parties in a Bentley and lives in a Holland Park mansion reputed to be worth £28 million. “You can’t move for photo shoots in that house,” says a magazine journalist who fixed a shoot with her only to find, once the magazine had gone to press, that she had also arranged one to run in a rival publication at an earlier date.
Advertisement
She throws lavish parties. At one her image was beamed against the side of the house. A party at her home in St Tropez, for 500 guests, had a Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend theme.
“She knows lots of people but she doesn’t have lots of friends,” said one former magazine editor who has dealt with her. “People go because they are curious to see what a party thrown by someone with so much money is like. It’s social tourism.”
She does not mind discussing her striking appearance. In a previous interview with the Standard, in which she posed topless with a hand shielding each breast and wearing a diamond ring the size of a baby’s fist, she explained that her full lips are natural but that she’s not averse to Botox.
“My mother says, ‘Maybe you should have your nose a bit thinner’, and I say, ‘No! My nose is fine!’”
While just how she has managed to rise to the heart of British high society remains somewhat opaque, she is very frank about certain matters, regaling interviewers with her problems in finding the right butlers and the difficulties she has insuring her jewellery.
She has said she is very ambitious. “What I want is to become more powerful and overtake some of the men I’m bothered about in Kazakhstan,” she said last year. “That’s always a good driving force.”
She didn’t explain what her next move will be in Britain.