MonarchyPair 'tried to blackmail royal with gay sex claims'
Two men attempted to blackmail a member of the royal family with claims he performed oral sex on another man and was dishonest in his business dealings, a court was told today.
Ian Strachan and Sean McGuigan tried to extort £50,000 from the alleged victim – who cannot be named, but is not a senior royal – using audio and video recordings of a long-standing royal employee recounting the allegations, the jury at the Old Bailey heard.
It is the first alleged blackmail case involving a British royal for more than a century.
The recordings, lasting eight hours in total, also featured the employee making "scandalous and disparaging remarks" about other members of the royal family, said Mark Ellison QC, prosecuting.
After trying unsuccessfully to sell the recordings to tabloid newspapers the duo told an associate of the royal they would hand over the recordings in exchange for £50,000, the court heard.
They arranged to meet someone representing the royal at a London hotel, but instead ended up discussing the demands with an undercover police officer.
Strachan, 31, from Fulham, west London, and 41-year-old McGuigan from Battersea, south London, deny making "an unwarranted demand with menaces" of £50,000.
The jury heard that early last year the pair made a series of audio and video recordings of the man, who had worked for the member of the extended royal family for many years.
The recordings – made using McGuigan's mobile phone and then downloaded on to a computer – were mainly made when the man was drunk or under the influence of drugs, Ellison said.
They included three audio files of the man apparently asserting that the member of the royal family who employed him had performed an act of oral sex on him".
He also recounted :allegations of impropriety as to how his employer conducted aspects of his business," Ellison said.
The man additionally spoke about "a wide range of other members of the royal family - which included a number of scandalous and disparaging remarks".
The court was told that Strachan and McGuigan approached Max Clifford, the News of the World and the Sun and other papers, but despite some initial interest were turned down.
Strachan told a News of the World reporter that the sex act took place in a kitchen at a party attended by the royal, the employee and himself.
McGuigan then telephoned the royal's PA and another close associate, known as witness C, to discuss the matter, saying he wanted to protect the royal from the material reaching the press.
McGuigan told witness C that he and Strachan were merely seeking to point out the untrustworthiness of the employee on the recordings, but that if the royal wanted to "take care of them" they would not object, Ellison told the court.
When witness C refused, saying the pair should simply destroy the material, Strachan called back to claim they had been offered money for the tapes and that they wanted up to £50,000 for them.
Witness C contacted the police and continued negotiating with the pair, saying the royal did not want to "pay that big amount under duress" without guarantees all the embarrassing material was being destroyed.
Strachan and witness C arranged a meeting at the Hilton hotel in Park Lane, London, on September 11 last year, the jury was told.
However, while the duo believed they would see "Paul", another royal representative, he was in fact an undercover police officer wearing a concealed recording device.
At the meeting, Ellison said, extracts of the recordings were shown and summarised to show the "potential damage" to the royal, with Strachan telling the police officer the News of the World were considering paying more than £200,000 and that Clifford was also "very interested".
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