Are Prince Andrew and Fergie back together? Since the Duke and Duchess of York’s divorce in 1996, royal watchers have been asking if the exes will tie the knot for a second time. The Yorks have given the public many reasons to speculate. The controversial, scandal-prone couple still live together at the Royal Lodge, and even adopted Queen Elizabeth’s corgis, Muick and Sandy, after the monarch’s death in September 2022. For the world’s “happiest divorced couple,” it’s their own version of happily ever after. “We enjoy each other’s company; we allow each other to blossom,” Fergie once said. “I know it sounds like a fairytale but that’s the way we are.”
1985: Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson Start to Date
According to reports, Princess Diana believes her friend Fergie, the fun-loving, outgoing daughter of Prince Charles’s polo manager, will get along famously with Prince Andrew, the queen’s favorite son whose raunchy ways have earned him the nickname “Randy Andy.” And she’s right. On June 18, 1985, Prince Andrew and Fergie are seated next to each other for a luncheon at Windsor Castle, during the week of the Royal Ascot. They get on like a house on fire. “He fed her profiteroles and she punched him in the arm, saying they were much too fattening,” Kitty Kelleywrites in The Royals. “He tried to stuff them into her mouth, and she laughingly threatened a food fight.”
Thus begins a whirlwind romance. “In Andrew I found my perfect man and soul mate. He was relaxed and endlessly charming, a prankster like me, yet solid and kind,” Fergie writes in Finding Sarah: A Duchess’s Journey to Find Herself. “In me, I suppose Andrew saw a wildflower — a bubbly and forthright woman without pretense or motives. Together we were like well-matched bookends, pleasant to look at and equally supportive of one another.”
1986: The Engagement
On February 19, 1986, Prince Andrew proposes to Fergie at Floors Castle in Scotland. According to The Royals, the proposal goes off in the couple’s signature cheeky fashion:
During a game of hide-and-seek, Andrew hid under a table, and Sarah, who was blindfolded, crawled around the floor looking for him. When she found him, she pinched his behind — hard. “Steady on!” he shouted. “You’re not allowed to squeeze the royal bottom yet!” That evening he proposed. Sarah replied, “When you wake up tomorrow morning, you can tell me it’s all a huge joke.” The next morning Andrew proposed again and gave her a $37,000 ruby ring.
Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson photographed at Buckingham Palace after the announcement of their engagement, 1986. Tom Stoddart Archive/Getty Images.
The engagement of Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson is announced publicly on March 19, 1986. “I know that the decision I made to marry Sarah was, and always will be, the best decision I have made, or ever will make in my life,” Prince Andrew says.
1986: Prince Andrew and Fergie Wed
On July 23, 1986, Prince Andrew and Fergie’s wedding is held at Westminster Abbey in London. The ceremony is viewed by an estimated 500 million people worldwide. Despite the enormous public interest, the newly styled Duchess of York calls it “the happiest day of my life.”
“With nearly a million people lining the one-mile route, Dad looked desperately flustered. But I was just cruising. This was fun,” Fergie recalled. “On my wedding day all I knew or cared about was that Fergie was in glorious vogue.”
Waving from the balcony of Buckingham Palace on their wedding day. Derek Hudson/Getty Images.
First there was kohl. That was ancient Egypt, where both men and women used malachite and kohl to darken their lashes, but it took until the 19th century to bottle mascara and start the false-lash trend. Back then, the French began sewing hairs onto their eyelids, and a Canadian in the US patented an early version of “strip lashes,” the familiar crescent of lashes we now buy in pharmacies. Since then, oversized lashes have been intermittently popular—think Twiggy in the 1960s—with the current explosion beginning in the early 2000s, when the Asian eyelash-extension craze began to rip through Hollywood, with celebrities from Jennifer Lopez to Paris Hilton cramming into estheticians’ chairs to achieve peak flutter.
During these years, I was living in Los Angeles, and I had a friend who was obsessed with lashes. Sahara Lotti was a screenwriter who was also furiously buying and selling Balenciaga bags. She’d noticed that most of what she saw for sale online was fake, and wrote a manifesto about how to spot it, then sold a PDF of instructions online for five dollars. After that, she started calling around to Barneys and other department stores to order real Balenciagas, flipping them for a higher price on eBay. This sideline faded when she landed a script deal with Fox, but then she started moonlighting as an online intuitive, gathering Hollywood clients before she went on retainer for a member of the royal family of Qatar.
In other words, Lotti was a woman who could spot a hole in the market. And as she became increasingly intolerant of going out without her lashes, and increasingly bored of sitting in Koreatown having them applied on end, she started messing with lashes herself, trying to suss out a DIY method. My husband introduced her to an industrial designer for Starbucks who was interested in picking up freelance work, and the industrial designer introduced her to a brand designer. Within a few months, they all flew off to Korea. After that, when I’d visit her at home on Sunset Plaza Drive, she’d be focused on hair irons, glues, and cut-up lashes. She created a tweezer shaped like a Nike swoosh she called a “wand”; she wanted to attach each little cluster of hairs to the eye individually, which made fake lashes look more natural.
Sahara LottiCourtesy of Lashify.
Lotti set Lashify’s price point high, and the margin higher. She rented a loft office on Greene Street, a warehouse in North Hollywood, a pop-up store in SoHo. Lupita Nyong’o and Nicole Kidman were wearing Lashify, and so was Cynthia Nixonduring her campaign for mayor. Not that there was anything glamorous about the eyelash business; it was a grind, and she worked around the clock, convinced she was going to win this lash game. Like all entrepreneurs, particularly one who thinks she can read the future, she believed it was only a matter of time before everyone on earth realized they didn’t need mascara or extensions. They just needed Lashify.
There were other female inventors in the space, but not many. In 2012, Alexandra Byrne of Beta Beauty Lab patented a segmented style of strip lashes. Byrne wrote via email, “My technology came from being a makeup artist for runway shows in London, Europe, and New York. When I wanted the models to all look exactly the same, like an army, I started cutting apart different strip lashes into pieces (I called it the lash hospital) and then fitting every model individually—it was the only way to make all lashes look identical, by customizing them for each eye shape and face.”
There was also Katy Stoka,inventor of the wildly popular magnetic lash. Stoka’s lashes used rectangular magnets to attach fake lashes to your real ones. “It was a lot of blood, sweat, and tears developing the product, and then it was the biggest thrill of my life,” says Stoka. “I wasn’t even in the beauty industry and I invented something, built a patent around it, somehow got the prototype made. Next thing I knew, I was on the shelf in Sephora, and then we were the number-one-googled beauty question of 2018.”
Stoka was knocked off by Asian suppliers, who flooded the market with dupes—not a surprise in the IP game. You probably know that music is heavily copyrighted in the United States, and that fashion is largely not (the evidence is on display every time you walk into an H&M), but beauty giants take out loads of patents. For example, as of July 2020, L’Oréal has 3,717 patent families to guard against the types of lawsuits and conflicts that abound these days. Charlotte Tilbury pursued and won a copyright claim in the UK against Aldi after it released a makeup palette that she claimed copied her Filmstar Bronze and Glow. (At the time, an Aldi spokesperson said, “This matter relates to a product that was on sale for a very short period around December 2018.”) Revolution Beauty pulled its Honey Bear brow product off the market after indie brand Pink Honey accused it on social media of copying its Honey Glue Original Superhold for brows. Olaplex initially won a suit against L’Oréal, claiming the brand copied its hair-treatment tech, but an appeals court later threw out the ruling. (The case has since been settled to “mutual satisfaction,” the CEO of Olaplex toldThe New York Times.)
Carrie Tolstedt, the former head of Wells Fargo’s retail banking division, has agreed to plead guilty to obstructing a government examination of the bank’s misconduct.
File photo
Wells Fargo’s scandalous practice of billing customers for unauthorized accounts could send a former top executive to prison and already has saddled her with millions of dollars in fines.
Under an agreement announced Wednesday in the California federal courts, Carrie Tolstedt, the longtime head of Wells Fargo’s retail banking division, agreed to plead guilty to obstructing a government examination of the bank’s misconduct.
Tolstedt, 63, faces up to 16 months in prison, a $100,000 fine and three years of supervised release, according to her plea agreement.
In a separate civil settlement also announced Wednesday, Tolstedt has also been banned from working in the banking industry and must pay a $17 million penalty.
She is expected to make her first appearance on the criminal charge in the Los Angeles federal courts on April 7. Her plea agreement must be approved by a judge.
Former Wells Fargo community bank head Carrie Tolstedt
“Today’s plea agreement holds the defendant accountable for her role in obstructing the examination into the unlawful sales practices at Wells Fargo, which deceived millions of clients who placed their trust in the institution,” said Acting Inspector General Tyler Smith of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., Office of Inspector General, in a statement that followed the announcement of Tolstedt’s upcoming criminal plea.
Wells Fargo, based in San Francisco, maintains a massive financial and employment presence across the Charlotte area, with some 27,000 employees. It came to North Carolina in 2008 with the purchase of Wachovia.
Anatomy of a scandal
For more than a decade, Tolstedt served as the bank’s senior executive vice president of community banking, overseeing Wells Fargo’s consumer and small business retail business.
The Community Bank, which Tolstedt also directed, managed such products as checking and saving accounts, CDs, debit cards and other products.
But to meet excessive sales goals, thousands of Community Bank employees opened millions of accounts and other financial products from 2002 to 2016 that were unauthorized or fraudulent, prosecutors say.
In short, the bank’s customers did not want the products or know about them.
Yet Wells Fargo collected millions of dollars in fees and interest, damaged their customers’ credit ratings and unlawfully used sensitive personal information to both grow and hide the fraud.
Bank employees forged customer signatures, created phony PINs, and moved millions of dollars from actual accounts to the phony ones, practices known internally by bank employees as “gaming.”
Tolstedt, according to the plea agreement, became aware of the practices by 2004.
While the Community Bank under her watch eventually took steps to identify the sales misconduct, it did not look very hard. According to prosecutors, for every bank employee flagged internally for improper sales, more than 100 conducting the same frauds were never examined.
In May 2015, when banking regulators had begun examining Wells Fargo’s sales practices, Tolstedt contributed to an attempted cover-up that significantly downsized the scope of the scandal, according to Wednesday’s court filing.
Prosecutors say she helped prepare a memo that failed to disclose the actual number of employees fired or resigned for sales misconduct, or the tiny fraction of bank workers who were flagged internally.
Tolstedt retired from the bank in 2016.
In 2020, Wells acknowledged its misconduct by agreeing to pay a $3 billion fine to settle civil and criminal allegations with the U.S. Attorney’s Offices in Los Angeles and Charlotte, which continue to prosecute the case.
That same year, Tolstedt was still proclaiming her innocence.
“Ms. Tolstedt acted appropriately, transparently and in good faith at all times,” her attorney said. “We look forward to setting the record straight and clearing her name.”
This story was originally published March 15, 2023, 5:37 PM.
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Michael Gordon has been the Observer’s legal affairs writer since 2013. He has been an editor and reporter at the paper since 1992, occasionally writing about schools, religion, politics and sports. He spent two summers as “Bikin Mike,” filing stories as he pedaled across the Carolinas.
Disgraced “Crypto Queen” Ruja Ignatova’stime on the run may be coming to an end.
Cryptoqueen via Facebook
Ignatova,42, a German citizen born in Bulgaria, is a former crypto pioneer who vanished in October 2017 after over-promising high returns on her OneCoin crypto token in a $4 billion Ponzi Scheme. She’s now facing several charges of fraud and has been on the run from the FBI for five years.
Although she hasn’t been seen since her disappearance, a new London apartment listing suggests she’s alive and evading arrest.
Ignatova, the only woman on the FBI’s most wanted list, was recently found to be connected to an £11 million [$13.6 million] penthouse apartment for sale in Kensington, England, thanks to a new rule change by the UK’s Companies House, which acts similarly to the U.S’s Public Company Accounting Oversight Board.
The rule now requires properties purchased by companies to also list a beneficiary, and while it is believed Ignatova originally purchased the home under a shell company, a new court filing to the UK’s financial regulators lists Ignatova as the “beneficial owner” of the property – inadvertently exposing her whereabouts.
Ignatova’s connection to the home was first spotted by the host of “The Missing Cryptoqueen” podcast, Jamie Bartlett.
“[The document] suggests she is still alive, and there are documents out there somewhere which contain vital clues as to her recent whereabouts,” Bartlett told iNews.
Since Ignatova’s link to the home, which was listed on Knight Frank real estate website, was confirmed, the listing has been removed.
Here’s what to know about the disgraced “Crypto Queen.”
Before Ruja Ignatova become one of 11 women to be on the FBI’s most wanted list in its 72-year history, she was regarded as a rising star in the crypto industry.
Ignatova was known for liking glitz and glamour, per CNN,and was revered for growing from her humble beginnings in Germany to success as a consultant and then a crypto entrepreneur.
Together with her business partner Sebastian Greenwood, the pair convinced investors to back their OneCoin crypto token which they said would be more valuable than Bitcoin. However, authorities found that OneCoin defrauded investors out of $4 billion in one of the largest international fraud schemes of all time.
“OneCoins were entirely worthless … (Their) lies were designed with one goal, to get everyday people all over the world to part with their hard-earned money,” U.S. prosecutors said, according to court documents.
Furthermore, the court documents reveal that Ignatova and Greenwood intended to deceive their clients from the get-go, calling their own token a “trashy coin” and discussing an exit strategy in private emails.
Their scheme imploded in 2016 when investors struggled to sell their OneCoins to recoup their investments, alerting the media and investigators to look into the business.
Then in October 2017, the U.S. Department of Justice charged Ignatova with one count of wire fraud, conspiracy to commit wire fraud, securities fraud, conspiracy to commit securities fraud, and conspiracy to commit money laundering, with a federal judge issuing a warrant for her arrest, court documents state.
But Ignatova fled on a flight from Sofia, Bulgaria, to Athens, Greece, just two weeks after the warrant was issued and she hasn’t been seen since.
The FBI has offered a $100,000 reward for information leading to her arrest. Additionally, they said: “Ignatova is believed to travel with armed guards and/or associates. Ignatova may have had plastic surgery or otherwise altered her appearance.”
The #FBI has named Ruja Ignatova to its Ten Most Wanted Fugitives List. She is wanted for her alleged participation in a large-scale fraud scheme involving cryptocurrency. Up to $100,000 reward offered for info leading to her arrest: https://t.co/oU7EKYqaCipic.twitter.com/tJ8co8aqx0
Ruja Ignatova and her cofounder lured people to their OneCoin scheme beginning in 2014 by promising investors around the world a fivefold or tenfold return on their investments.
Taking advantage of the crypto frenzy at the time, investors gave them $4 billion between 2014 and 2016. However, OneCoin’s value was manipulated by the company and it was never mined like other cryptocurrencies, despite telling investors otherwise, according to CNN.
Once regulators uncovered the scheme and Ignatova vanished, she left her partners to deal with the fallout.
Cofounder Sebastian Greenwood was arrested in July 2018. He’s currently in jail after pleading guilty to wire fraud, conspiracy to commit wire fraud, and conspiracy to launder money. He is set to be sentenced in April.
Ignatova’s brother, Konstantin Ignatov, who was also a part of the business scheme, was arrested in March 2019 and is set to be sentenced in February after pleading guilty to wire fraud conspiracy, money laundering, and fraud charges.
Since the scandal unraveled, OneCoin has been shut down and its website is no longer active.
A lawsuit filed by the victims against OneCoin revealed that Ignatova had $500 million in Dubai bank accounts as of 2021, per a report by Financial Finds. It’s unknown how much crypto she holds, but the outlet found that shewas paid 230,000 Bitcoins by a member of the Emirati royal family in 2015.
In fashion, the top headlines of 2022 were brimming with excitement and chaos.
Scandals swept Balenciaga and any brand associated with the artist formerly known as Kanye West. Legislation offered a new pathway for sustainability in fashion. A new guard of creatives took the helm at some of the world’s most stories houses, while a recession loomed over the whole industry.
Ever since the pandemic struck in 2020, the years have felt as though they’ve all bled together. That’s certainly true for fashion news — so, we’re recapping the biggest headlines in the industry from 2022, from the biggest controversies to the most notable moments of progress.
Designers Act Amid Russia’s war on Ukraine
Photo: Dimitar Dilkoff/Getty Images
In a major escalation of a longstanding conflict, Russia invaded Ukraine in late February, kicking off an intensified war that hasn’t stopped. The fashion industry responded with letters, donations and posts on social media. Vogue Ukraine called designers to action, while Granary — the fashion education platform founded by Ukrainian Central Saint Martins graduate Olya Kuryshchuk — shared an open letter urging the community to condemn Russia.
Groups like LVMH and Kering donated to aid groups like the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR), while some brands suspended business in Russia altogether. Meanwhile, designers like Demna took to the runway for messaging against the war (before the brand was embroiled in scandal).
Balenciaga ended the year not with a celebration, but with a series of apologetic statements.
The Kering-owned luxury brand released its Balenciaga Gift Shop campaign on Nov. 16, showing a range of new giftable items from the brand, “staged around children dressed in the Balenciaga Kids line” — however, it soon started trending, with many criticizing the photos showing children next to wine glasses, holding teddy bears in BDSM-reminiscent harnesses.
#BalenciagaGate only got more heat when people turned attention to its Spring 2023 campaign, released just a few days after on Nov. 21. The Joshua Bright-photographed imagery was set in an office, and among a variety of props strewn across a desk, there was a printed copy of the 2008 United States v. Williams decision on child pornography laws. More controversy ensued.
Every era in fashion has had its big names. Now, the industry is moving forward with a new guard of creatives taking seats at the helms of the world’s biggest, most influential houses.
Meanwhile, we’re seeing some of the most powerful names in fashion step back. Riccardo Tisci showed his final Burberry collection in September, and has been replaced by Daniel Lee. Alessandro Michele, who ushered in a new era of extravagance at Gucci, stepped down in November, after seven years at the helm and two decades at the brand. That month, Raf Simons also announced the closure of his eponymous label after 27 years in business.
Known for his encyclopedic knowledge of the industry and larger-than-life presence, Talley was creative director and then editor-at-large at Vogue, responsible for some must-read columns that inspired the next generation and becoming one of the first Black editors to reach the top of the masthead.
Raised in the Jim Crow South, Talley detailed his ascension in fashion and the racism he had to work against in his memoir, “The Chiffon Trenches.” He peeled back the curtain with language as entertaining as it is profound, welcoming wonder in a world often guarded by walls. He ushered in a new guard of dreamers, building his audience and developing close ties with educational institutions like SCAD.
As Fashionista reported, size diversity on the runway regressed in 2022, with the number of New York Fashion Week shows featuring non-sample-sized models dwindling from past seasons, after this issue had become such a talking point pre-pandemic. With runways often being in the market of what’s in and what’s cool, the exclusion of different bodies served as a disappointment.
Sustainability’s next frontier
Photo: Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images
The fashion industry is notoriously under-regulated, but a new chapter is on the horizon in the U.S., with legislation presenting a path forward for the conversation around sustainability.
… All the while, Kardashian was laughing her way to the bank, by way of Skims, which reached a $3.2 billion valuation in 2022, thanks to new funding and ever-loving fans.
“This latest round will allow us to focus on bringing more innovations and solutions to our customers and become even more of a trusted resource for them,” Kardashian told Fortune.
Since launching in 2019, Skims has found rapid success in shapewear and loungewear, with the pandemic catapulting its cozier categories. This year, the brand also took home the inaugural CFDA Innovation Award presented by Amazon at the trade organization’s annual ceremony.
Patagonia literally gave itself away as a company in the name of environmental preservation and sustainability: This year, American rock climber-turned-businessman Yvon Chouinard transferred ownership of the brand he founded to a trust and nonprofit. The company said it was “going purpose” instead of “going public,” making Earth its main shareholder — a first-of-its-kind move.
The year of the ‘nepo baby’
Photo: Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images
For the (somehow) uninitiated, “nepo babies” are relatives of successful, famous or otherwise well-connected people who then end up successful, famous or otherwise well-connected. In 2022, they got called out on online and on the front pages of magazines, with the connections that may have helped them reach their heights of career success being called into question.
Of course, fashion has always lovednepo babies, from Hadids to Jenners to Gerbers. And every year, there’s a new class to look out for in campaigns or sitting in the front row at a Miu Miu show.
Rihanna’s maternity style
Photo: Edward Berthelot/Getty Images
Rihanna has changed any and every new space she’s entered, so it’s no surprise she had the same effect on maternity style as she flaunted her pregnancy in the first half of 2022.
Rather than opting for clothes that covered up her growing bump, the Fenty founder refused to tone down sexiness or her own style. That meant: beaded halter tops, vintage Chanel, diamond belly chains and more. She even got “maternity crop tops” to trend.
Even after their split, Fox continued serving looks, becoming a TikTok star and highlighting emerging designers. She opened LaQuan Smith’s Fall 2022 show and was crowned one of Fashionista’s best dressed celebrities in 2022. She took the cake in ambitious dressing, daring any fan to take it up a notch and dream bigger through their clothes.
Wells Fargo reached a settlement with the Department of Labor on Monday on a federal investigation into its 401(k) plan.
Joshua Komer
jkomer@charlotteobserver.com
Wells Fargo has reached a $145 million settlement with the U.S. Department of Labor following an investigation into concerns over the the bank’s contributions to its 401(k) plan.
From 2013 through 2018, Wells Fargo overcharged 401(k) funds for company stock purchased for the plan, according to the Labor Department. The bank denied the allegations, and said it hasn’t conducted the transactions in question since 2018.
It’s the latest financial hit to the bank following a number of regulatory investigations into its activities.
Under the settlement announced Monday, Wells Fargo will pay approximately $131.8 million to eligible current and former 401(k) plan participants. The bank also agreed to pay a $13.2 million penalty.
“Our investigation found those responsible for Wells Fargo’s 401(k) plan paid more than fair market value for employer stock and, by doing so, betrayed the trust of the plan’s current and future retirees,” Labor Secretary Marty Walsh said in a news release.
The result, he said, was that retirement assets were “misused” and benefit plans suffered.
“The company strongly disagrees with the DOL’s allegations and believes it followed applicable laws in conducting the transactions,” the bank said in its news release. But it added that resolving the matter was “in the best interest of the company.”
As part of the settlement, the bank agreed to redeem certain preferred securities held by its 401(k) plan in exchange for shares of the company’s common stock.
In February, Wells Fargo disclosed in a securities filing that the Labor Department, along with other federal agencies, was looking into its 401(k) plan.
Wells Fargo is based in San Francisco but has its largest employment hub in Charlotte, with more than 27,000 workers here.
A series of concerns about Wells Fargo
Wells Fargo has faced a number of disputes with regulators and lawmakers in the last year, continuing a streak of negative publicity that has plagued the bank since its 2016 fake accounts scandal surfaced. In that case, bank employees created millions of accounts for customers without their knowledge.
In March, a Bloomberg investigation found that Wells Fargo approved fewer than half of Black homeowners’ mortgage refinancing applications in 2020, compared with 72% of white applicants. That led to 11 senators calling for a review of the bank’s mortgage refinancing processes.
U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, decried the bank’s “history of consumer abuses and gross mismanagement” in public comments in May.
Brown’s criticism was spurred by a New York Times report stating the bank had a number of “fake” interviews with female applicants or job candidates of color. The bank revamped its hiring guidelines in response to the backlash.
That same month, the bank’s broker-dealer business, Wells Fargo Advisors, settled with the Securities and Exchange Commission for $7 million on charges related to anti-money laundering law violations.
And nearly a year ago, the bank was fined $250 million by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency for failing to properly compensate customers affected by the bank’s prior “unsafe or unsound” home lending practices.
This story was originally published September 12, 2022 11:43 AM.
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Hannah Lang covers banking, finance and economic equity for The Charlotte Observer. Her work has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, the Triangle Business Journal and the Greensboro News & Record. She studied business journalism at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and grew up in the same town as her alma mater.
