Omid Scobie – seen by many as the Sussexes’ mouthpiece – has had his company MeYou dissolved, two months after being sent a formal warning. He was the sole director

It’s bad news for royal expert Omid Scobie. The Finding Freedom author has had his company forcibly closed down after receiving a compulsory strike-off notice in December.

Omid – who has close connections to Prince Harry and his wife Meghan Markle – established MeYou in 2016 and was the sole director. According to Companies House, the nature of the business was ‘other publishing activities’.

A compulsory strike-off notice is a formal warning that a company is at risk of being dissolved and removed from the Companies House register, reports MailOnline. It’s issued by Companies House when they believe a company is no longer trading. Omid, who now lives in California, just like the Sussexes, took no action and as a result MeYou has been dissolved.

The 43-year-old first came to public attention in August 2020 with the release of his co-authored book, Finding Freedom, which revolved around the married lives of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex and was written with Meghan’s contribution through a third-party source.

November 2023 saw the publication of Scobie’s next book, Endgame, in which he took aim at the British royal family as an institution as well as at individual members of the family. And there was further uproar when a Dutch translation named King Charles and the Princess of Wales as the two members of the royal household who allegedly raised “concerns” about the skin colour of Meghan and Harry’s then-unborn son.

After denying that he had ever named the two members of the Royal Family, Scobie later performed a U-turn that saw him admit that he did name the two Royals in an “early” version of the scathing book. Initially, Scobie had denied ever writing their names in the English manuscript, but he then said that an “uncleared” version of the manuscript was provided to the Dutch publisher without his knowledge, seemingly confirming the names at some stage.

According to the author, an “early and uncleared” version of Endgame was sent to the Dutch publisher so work could start on translating. The Dutch edition was not the final version he had submitted, he said.

Scobie admitted that his “stomach flipped” when he first realised the royals had been named. Writing in an opinion piece for the i, he said: “Unbeknownst to me at the time, early and uncleared text was provided to the Dutch publisher in order for them to start work on the translation, with the understanding that their translation would be updated to reflect the final version of the book I officially submitted.

“Other foreign-language publishers, including in France and Italy, were also doing the same thing, though their versions perfectly replicated the completed work. What I can be sure of is that I edited carefully, took independent legal advice, and the finished book that I submitted was not the version published in the Netherlands.”

Scobie said the only publisher he had worked with was the “one covering the US and UK”. He previously told the BBC he did not know how the Dutch translation came to name the two royals. And he had earlier stated on Dutch television: “For me, I edited and wrote the English version; there has never been a version that I’ve produced that has names in it.”