The British military subjected Prince Harry to Muslim taunts to prepare him for possible capture in Afghanistan, his new book claims.
In his memoir Spare, Harry writes about an army exercise in Cornwall, one of “the last hurdles for flight crews and pilots before deployment” in Afghanistan.
The exercise involved teaching survival techniques, such as how to catch and kill a chicken, and simulated a helicopter crash-landing behind enemy lines.
As they reached what they thought was the end, Prince Harry and his comrades were ambushed by a group of men in “camo jackets and black balaclavas”.
They wrapped blacked-out ski goggles over their eyes and zip-tied their hands before interrogating them.
Role-playing captors were used in the exercise with a woman in a scarf, seeking to exploit the duke's mother’s friendship with Dodi Fayed in the weeks before her death in a Paris car accident in 1997.
“She was wearing a shemagh over her face,” he writes. “She went on and on about something I didn’t understand. I couldn’t keep up.
“Then I realised. Mummy. She was talking about my mother. Your mother was pregnant when she died, eh? With your sibling? A Muslim baby!”
He said nothing, but “screamed with his eyes”, before she stormed out and one of the captors spat in his face. Senior officers later defended the exercise, saying “we felt you needed to be tested”, Prince Harry claims.
“I didn’t answer,” he says. “But that took it a bit too far.”
The book details how Prince Harry was steeled to be captured by the Taliban in Afghanistan on his first Apache helicopter mission.
He writes of how he had been prepared to ignore a “land now” warning light in his helicopter cockpit, which meant an operation during his second frontline tour in 2012 had to be abandoned.
A more experienced pilot turned them back to Camp Bastion in Helmand province, leaving the prince feeling cheated.
His admission in Spare that he killed 25 Taliban members during the war has sparked criticism from former military figures and protests in Helmand last weekend.
The prince was sent to Afghanistan in 2007, when the military posting was accompanied by a media blackout, and again in 2012.
“I wanted to go, go, go. I was willing to risk crashing, being taken prisoner — whatever,” he says of the 2012 Apache mission that was aborted.
He has written at length about his military experience, describing how he narrowly escaped being hit in a huge explosion during his first stint in the country in 2007-08.
“I felt it in my brain. I looked around. Everyone was on their stomachs,” he says.
On his second tour, for which he had retrained as an Apache helicopter pilot, the prince writes: “I was the first in my squadron to pull the trigger in anger.”
Prince Harry says he had killed before but it was “my most direct contact with the enemy ever” as he fired on Taliban fighters riding motorbikes.
In the book he says the thumbstick he fired was “remarkably similar” to the controls for a PlayStation game he played at the camp.
“We swooped back to camp, critiqued the video. Perfect kill. We played some more PlayStation."
But later in the memoir he says he threw down a newspaper in disgust when he saw the headline “Harry compares killing to video game” after mentioning the similarity in a media interview.
The duke recounts how he realised his secret tour of duty had been exposed in 2008 when he overheard coded messages that suggested “Red Fox” was about to be murdered.
“I blinked at the radio and knew with total certainty that Red Fox was me,” he says.
Harry had his cover blown when an Australian magazine leaked the news that he was serving on the ground in the conflict. He was pulled out of the country.
But he also opens up about the impact the war had on him.
When he returned home in 2012 to meet then-girlfriend Cressida Bonas, he says she and his cousin Princess Eugenie told him he looked in some way like a different person, which he described as frightening and off-putting for Ms Bonas.
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Mercer, the investment consulting arm of US services company Marsh & McLennan, expects its wealth division to at least double its assets under management (AUM) in the Middle East as wealth in the region continues to grow despite economic headwinds, a company official said.
Mercer Wealth, which globally has $160 billion in AUM, plans to boost its AUM in the region to $2-$3bn in the next 2-3 years from the present $1bn, said Yasir AbuShaban, a Dubai-based principal with Mercer Wealth.
“Within the next two to three years, we are looking at reaching $2 to $3 billion as a conservative estimate and we do see an opportunity to do so,” said Mr AbuShaban.
Mercer does not directly make investments, but allocates clients’ money they have discretion to, to professional asset managers. They also provide advice to clients.
“We have buying power. We can negotiate on their (client’s) behalf with asset managers to provide them lower fees than they otherwise would have to get on their own,” he added.
Mercer Wealth’s clients include sovereign wealth funds, family offices, and insurance companies among others.
From its office in Dubai, Mercer also looks after Africa, India and Turkey, where they also see opportunity for growth.
Wealth creation in Middle East and Africa (MEA) grew 8.5 per cent to $8.1 trillion last year from $7.5tn in 2015, higher than last year’s global average of 6 per cent and the second-highest growth in a region after Asia-Pacific which grew 9.9 per cent, according to consultancy Boston Consulting Group (BCG). In the region, where wealth grew just 1.9 per cent in 2015 compared with 2014, a pickup in oil prices has helped in wealth generation.
BCG is forecasting MEA wealth will rise to $12tn by 2021, growing at an annual average of 8 per cent.
Drivers of wealth generation in the region will be split evenly between new wealth creation and growth of performance of existing assets, according to BCG.
Another general trend in the region is clients’ looking for a comprehensive approach to investing, according to Mr AbuShaban.
“Institutional investors or some of the families are seeing a slowdown in the available capital they have to invest and in that sense they are looking at optimizing the way they manage their portfolios and making sure they are not investing haphazardly and different parts of their investment are working together,” said Mr AbuShaban.
Some clients also have a higher appetite for risk, given the low interest-rate environment that does not provide enough yield for some institutional investors. These clients are keen to invest in illiquid assets, such as private equity and infrastructure.
“What we have seen is a desire for higher returns in what has been a low-return environment specifically in various fixed income or bonds,” he said.
“In this environment, we have seen a de facto increase in the risk that clients are taking in things like illiquid investments, private equity investments, infrastructure and private debt, those kind of investments were higher illiquidity results in incrementally higher returns.”
The Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, one of the largest sovereign wealth funds, said in its 2016 report that has gradually increased its exposure in direct private equity and private credit transactions, mainly in Asian markets and especially in China and India. The authority’s private equity department focused on structured equities owing to “their defensive characteristics.”
