Illustration: By The Cut; Photos: Getty Images
this week, times Kate Middleton's parents, Carole and Michael Middleton, owe hundreds of thousands of pounds stemming from the sale of their children's party supplies company, Party Pieces, UK reports. The news comes less than a month after the Princess of Wales shared in a video that she had been diagnosed with cancer and was undergoing preventive chemotherapy — and now the tabloids are saying her mother is trying to protect her from the family's financial pressures. Here's what we know about the situation.
Middleton's parents were working for British Airways when they married, but for the past few decades, they have been running a party planning and decoration company that they founded in 1987, inspired by Kate's fifth birthday party. Carol launched it as a mail-order business, running it from her kitchen table, and after a few years, Michael quit his job as an airline dispatcher to get on a plane. Over the years, the couple built a team of 12 staff and ran the business from their home in Berkshire. Profits from Party Pieces are said to have paid for a larger family home, as well as a school for Kate and her two siblings. Before marrying Prince William, Kate reportedly worked as a project manager at Party Pieces.
In 2019, Carole Middleton reportedly sold her 49 percent stake and handed control of Party Pieces to investors (tabloids later said she would leave the business and head toward retirement). Over the next few years, business began to decline, taking hits from rocky pandemic sales and an expensive launch in the United States. In March 2023, Party Pieces hired an insolvency firm called Interpath Advisory and declared the UK equivalent of bankruptcy (the process there is known as “administration”). With Interpath's direction, the couple sold some of the party pieces to James Sinclair, a millionaire businessman who was daily Mail He was described as a 'kids party entrepreneur' in May 2023 for £180,000. By that stage, the company was in a very poor state, reportedly owing £2.6 million in unpaid taxes, bank loans, a coronavirus business loan, and payments owed to suppliers, including its helium gas business. A report from Interpath noted that even with the profits generated from the sale of the Hail Marys, Party Pieces likely won't be able to repay everyone.
It's a bit unclear whether anyone will be saddled with these debts – under UK law, much of the payments owed are dropped when a company goes into administration – but so far Party Pieces appears to be holding up under Sinclair's ownership. At the very least, his website (and Instagram account) are efficient and up-to-date. Its recovery is still being overseen by Interpath, which will apparently release another report on the company's health in May.
While Carol and Michael no longer owe their creditors millions, they do He remains in debt to Interpath, whose fees for overseeing the sale of the company are said to have put the couple in a slightly shallower pool of debt. on monday, times UK reported that the Middleton family has £260,000 owed to Interpath to oversee the insolvency of their company. A December progress report from Interpath said that the agency's fees ended up being higher than initially expected because its employees had to devote extra hours to navigating the logistics of the sale, but the company “does not intend to fully withdraw our fees.” In other words, The Middleton family does not appear to be under much pressure to pay off their debts at the moment.
Of course, a family financial crisis is not the kind of news a woman undergoing chemotherapy needs to hear we She claims that Carol is “desperately trying to keep Katherine fully focused on her recovery.” A source told the magazine that Kate's parents “are not looking for any help from their children and do not want them to be worried.” As if this family didn't have enough to deal with already.
