THE TRANSYLVANIAN COUNT, THE NAZI'S NEPHEW AND THE KAZAKH TYCOON: THE COLOURFUL GUESTS CHARLES HAS INVITED TO THE PALACE

By Simon Walters And Glen Owen
Last updated at 12:28 AM on 10th April 2011

It is the most sought after invitation of the year, and today The Mail on Sunday can reveal who has made it on to the official guest list for the Royal Wedding. As well as the ceremony at Westminster Abbey on Friday, April 29.

650 guests will join newlyweds Prince William and Kate Middleton for their wedding breakfast at Buckingham Palace.

Of those, 50 have been invited by the Queen, 250 by Prince Charles and the Duchess of Cornwall, and 100 by the Middletons. William and Kate themselves have invited 250. The names include everyone from friends and family to the great and the good. But by far the most surprising are those who have been invited by Prince Charles.

First girlfriend: Lucia Santa Cruz, pictured with Prince Charles in 1968, first introduced him to Camilla

His list is crammed with mega-rich foreigners, many of whom have been linked to financial and personal controversy, and is bound to lead to questions over the criteria used for selecting guests.

It reads like an international version of Who’s Who, full of exotic foreign names and grand sounding titles. Many are virtually unknown – but a common thread runs through the list: money, and lots of it.

The list includes the obligatory Kazakh billionaire; a Rear Admiral who isn’t a real Rear Admiral and who lives with Princess Diana’s half-Italian former personal shopper; a German playboy-turned-art collector whose uncle was an SS officer sentenced to 25 years in jail after the war; a US City slicker whose bank was fined over a scandal involving Chilean dictator General Pinochet; a Transylvanian count who is the landlord of Charles’s two Romanian properties in Dracula country; and a Florentine noble whose wine-making firm was accused of faking wine labels.

It also includes a Latin American beauty said to have been Charles’s first girlfriend and who went on to introduce him to Camilla.

No Royal event seems to be complete these days without a tycoon from the former Soviet state of Kazakhstan. Prince Andrew is a frequent visitor to the oil-rich nation and sold the house he once shared with Sarah Ferguson to a Kazakh billionaire for £3 million more than the asking price.

Another Kazakh tycoon, Timur Kuanyshev, will be at the wedding breakfast. A classic ‘Red to Riches’ oligarch, his entree to the Royal circle came via his friend Prince Michael of Kent, whom he invited to Kazakhstan in 2009. They have also been seen together in London.

Kuanyshev, son of a leading Kazakh communist from Soviet times, made his fortune from oil and construction. He runs the BATT Corporation with his wife Alfiya and has spent large sums on good causes. London’s Royal Opera acknowledges their ‘generous philanthropic support’ for the current run of Aida.

Tycoon: Kazakh businessman Timur Kuanyshev (left) has made his fortune from the oil and construction industries

It is all a long way from the day in October 1993 when Kuanyshev was allegedly detained by Russian customs with his wife and two associates at Moscow’s Domodedovo Airport.

They were accused of concealing $1,000,000 in undeclared US dollar cash in their underwear. The money being smuggled out of Russia was said to have been a loan meant to be placed in a bank in Kazakhstan. But the case never went to court.

Fellow wedding breakfast guest Juergen Pierburg is the former playboy son of a Nazi-era industrialist whose factories fed the German war effort. Mr Pierburg, now a billionaire art collector and philanthropist, lives in Switzerland and owns a 30-room schloss at Neuss which, in the Eighties, was a magnet for Europe’s wealthy art-collecting set.

In his youth, he threw lavish parties and once flew in Andy Warhol from New York to attend one. His wealth comes mainly from his father Alfred, whose Deutsche Vergaser (DVG) carburettor plants in Germany churned out parts during the war.

He was appointed a Wehrwirtschaftsführer – ‘war industry leader’ – and had his oath of office administered by Hitler personally.

After the war, the firm became one of Germany’s most successful engineering companies.

Alfred’s younger brother, SS Colonel Kurt Pierburg, tried to prevent the Allies taking control of DVG after Hitler’s downfall and was sentenced to 25 years in jail.

When Alfred died in 1975, Juergen took over the company and became one of the richest men in Europe.

Landlord: Romanian Count Tibor Kalnoky manages Prince Charles' buy-to-let properties in Transylvania

The list includes two senior figures from Porcelanosa, the Spanish tiling giant which was rewarded with a Royal Warrant after carrying out extensive work at Charles’s residences. The company has donated hundreds of thousands of pounds to his favourite charities and enjoyed Royal parties thrown in its honour.

Pedro Pesudo, a Porcelanosa director, and Manuel Colonques, the company’s chairman, make it on to the list. Last month, The Mail on Sunday revealed that Porcelanosa had met a ‘significant proportion’ of the costs of a lavish dinner at Buckingham Palace, attended by stars such as Rowan Atkinson and Jeremy Irons.

Lucia Santa Cruz will bring Latin glamour to the wedding breakfast. The daughter of the former Chilean ambassador was taken to Balmoral by a gauche 19-year-old Charles in 1967 and was his first serious girlfriend. She has always been coy about the depth of their relationship.

In the early Seventies she introduced Charles to ‘just the girl’ for him – a 24-year-old Camilla Shand. The women met again two years ago when they shared an embrace during a visit by the Royal couple to an organic vineyard in Chile.

Lucia returned to Chile in 1973, after the coup by Augusto Pinochet, and married politician Juan Luis Ossa Buines and had four children. She became a campaigner on behalf of Pinochet, and came under fire from critics when she helped the dictator’s legal team to block his extradition from the UK to Spain over allegations of murder and torture during his military coup.

Reminded recently of her dates with Charles, godfather to one of her children, she said: ‘That was 40 years ago. I wish I was that thin again.’

The wedding breakfast will give Charles the chance to check on two buy-to-let properties he bought in Transylvania, Romania, in 2006. Guest Count Kalnoky is his landlord, a Romanian aristocrat whose lineage can be traced to the 12th century.

The urbane count, who speaks fluent English, German, French, Hungarian and Romanian, and whose great uncle was prime minister of the Austro-Hungarian empire, manages the £670-a-week properties in the foothills of the Carpathians.

Kalnoky’s family were driven out by the communists after the war, but he reclaimed his land after the fall of president Nicolae Ceausescu.

Italian aristocrat Marchesi Vittorio Frescobaldi can be expected to scrutinise the fine wines at the breakfast. Frescobaldi is a wine magnate whose family has wielded power in Florence since the 13th Century and once held the purse strings of the British Monarchy. In the 1270s, the Frescobaldis loaned money to King Edward I to finance his wars. Former customers have ranged from Henry VIII to Michelangelo.

However, over the past five years, the family has been dogged by allegations of a wine label scam, centring on claims that grapes had been imported from outside the Tuscan region. Frescobaldi strongly denies any wrongdoing.

Exotic couple: Rear Admiral Sir Donald Gosling is invited along with his partner Gabriella di Nora, who is 30 years his junior

American banker Joe Allbritton is the former owner of Riggs bank, an imposing Washington institution that used to refer to itself as the ‘bank of presidents’.

It dropped the boastful tag five years ago after being fined £23 million as a result of a US Congress investigation into a money-laundering plot involving Saudi diplomats and South America dictators – including Chile’s Pinochet.

Mr Allbritton, who co-owned the bank with his philanthropist wife Barbie and has always denied any wrongdoing, has been a regular guest of Charles at Highgrove and lent him a Gulfsteam private jet. He also gave £190,000 a year to the American-based Prince of Wales Foundation.

One of the most exotic-sounding pairings on the list is that of Rear Admiral Sir Donald Gosling and Miss Gabriella Di Nora.

The Rear Admiral is a purely honorary title, a reward for his generous contributions to Naval charities. In fact, Sir Donald, 82, served just five years in the Navy after joining as an Able Seaman in 1944.

Tile king: Porcelanosa chairman Manuel Colonques with his daughter Maria

After being demobbed, he turned reclaimed bomb sites into parking lots – eventually netting £290 million when he sold National Car Parks 50 years later.

After his 29-year marriage ended in 1988, he formed a relationship with Miss Di Nora, nearly 30 years his junior. As head of personal shopping at Selfridge’s, half-Italian Miss Di Nora used to escort Princess Diana on shopping trips at the West End store.

Three years ago, Charles and Camilla used Sir Donald’s £50 million 246ft yacht for a Caribbean cruise that cost taxpayers £220,000 for a 12-day break.

The guest list also includes Lily Safra, who accumulated an estimated £600 million from four marriages and lives in the £350 million Villa Leopolda on the French Riviera. Her fourth husband Edmond Safra, a Brazilian-naturalised Jewish Lebanese banker, died in a fire in his Monaco apartment in 1999 in circumstances which remain the subject of intense speculation.