Rolling Stones’ financial manager dies aged 80
The Bavarian aristocrat whose financial wizardry turned the Rolling Stones into musical multimillionaires has died aged 80. During almost four decades of handling the band’s affairs Prince Rupert zu Loewenstein, head of a small London merchant bank, helped Mick Jagger alone amass an estimated fortune of £200 million. Prince Rupert’s neat suits and distaste for rock and roll made him an unlikely member of the Stones’ entourage but he quickly struck up a firm friendship with Jagger, later becoming godfather to his son James.
Most notoriously, his advice in the early 1970s prompted the band to abandon their UK residence for the south of France, helping them save millions while becoming Britain’s first musical tax exiles.
He was instrumental in extricating the band from an unsatisfactory relationship with their former manager Allen Klein, and his influence helped convince Jagger to continue touring throughout the 1980s and 1990s when relationships within the group were cooling.
Prince Rupert, described by one City colleague as “a bit extraordinary”, recalled in a book published last year how his long relationship with the band had “never changed my habits, my clothes or my attitudes”.
“Although I enjoyed a good vintage wine, I was never a heavy drinker, nor a drug-taker. I always aimed to maintain a strict discipline backstage,” he said.
“To many outsiders it must seem extraordinary that I was never a fan of the Stones’ music, or indeed of rock-and-roll in general. Yet I feel that precisely because I was not a fan … I was able to view the band and what they produced calmly, dispassionately, maybe even clinically – though never without affection.”
The Prince was born in Majorca in 1933 to Prince Leopold of the royal house of Wittelsbach, but was educated in England and studied History at Magdalen College, Oxford before going on to work in the City.
He once recalled how as managing director of Leopold Joseph & Co, the merchant banking firm he had bought with a clutch of friends for £600,000, he fought with his partners over whether to take on the Stones as clients.
“They were very much against any involvement, saying it would be bad for the image of the firm,” he said. “It was very hard to win them over, but I finally prevailed.”
Source: The Telegraph
Photo: Richard Young / REX
