Aristocrat who made the Rolling Stones' fortune dies

The Rolling Stones. Photo / Getty Images

The Bavarian aristocrat whose financial wizardry helped to turn the Rolling Stones into multimillionaires has died aged 80.

During almost four decades of handling the band's affairs, Prince Rupert zu Loewenstein, the head of a small London merchant bank, helped Sir Mick Jagger alone amass a fortune estimated at £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, and went on to become godfather to his son James.

Notoriously, his advice in the early 1970s prompted the band to abandon the UK for the south of France, making them 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, the Oxford-educated son of Prince Leopold of the royal house of Wittelsbach, recalled 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."