London, Mar 12: Aside from his mother and wife, Prince Andrew, a close pal of billionaire sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, has found a loyal apologist in Kazakhstani bombshell Goga Ashkenazi.
This week Ashkenazi, 31, cheerfully revealed how the Prince had been communicating his latest anxieties to her by BlackBerry.
"He knows it was unwise to fraternise with this Epstein character, and it was silly to be photographed with his arm around Epstein's masseuse [17-year-old Virginia Roberts]," the Daily Mail quoted her as saying.
"But I know Andrew as a lovely, lovely man, kind-hearted, impeccably behaved and honourable, and I'm quite sure that at the time he had no idea this girl was under-age or anything more than a masseuse to Epstein."
Goga is the daughter of former engineer and rising communist Erkin Berkaliev and went on to marry Stefan Ashkenazy, heir to the multi-million-pound L'Ermitage hotel group. But the marriage fell apart after they moved to Los Angeles, which she hated.
Goga met Prince Andrew at a party thrown by Hanson in 2001.
"Imagine - he grew up surrounded by Renoirs!" she said later, recalling how he had led her down a long corridor lined with Old Masters and said nonchalantly: "I used to ride my bike along here."
This week, she denied for the first time Andrew was her lover, but a year ago when asked by a journalist she did not deny it, saying "a girl has to have some secrets."
She also once texted him to say a newspaper was reporting that she was madly in love with him. He texted back, "Well, aren't you?"
Goga is also a close friend of Colonel Gaddafi's son Saif, 38.
Goga and Saif have been wolf-hunting together during one of their jaunts, though she is now keen to distance herself from him and has recast him merely as an acquaintance.
In Kazakhstan, critics of the regime say Goga's wealth derives not from her brilliance in business, but from her former lover Timur Kulibayev, the President's son-in-law.
In December 2007, her son Adam was born at the private Portland Hospital in London with Kulibayev - then as now married to the President's daughter - named on the birth certificate as his father.
Today Goga says she is single, but admits she is still close to Kulibayev and acknowledges he helped her in attaining her wealth.
