No embarrassing revelation. In a long survey published on Sunday February 7, The Guardian says Queen Elizabeth II succeeded in pressuring the government in the mid-1970s to keep her private fortune, deemed “embarrassing”, not disclosed to the general public. The British daily has indeed unearthed a series of government memos in the National Archives, which provide proof that the sovereign’s lawyer lobbied several ministers. The latter then succeeded in having a bill on transparency amended.
This arrangement notably made it possible to create a shell company supported by the British state, to hide the investments and private expenses of Elizabeth II until at least 2011. As a reminder, the true extent of his wealth has never been revealed, but is estimated to be in the hundreds of millions of pounds.
The “Queen’s Consent”, obscure parliamentary procedure
All of this was made possible by an obscure parliamentary procedure known as “Queen’s Consent”. It gives the Sovereign the power to be solicited before a law is approved by Parliament and requires ministers to alert her when a bill is likely to affect the Crown. According to Oxford University constitutional law specialist Thomas Adams, the existence of this procedure seems to have given Elizabeth II “substantial influence” over the bills that impacted it, as he tells Guardian.
So, in November 1973, the monarch commissioned her private lawyer, Matthew Farrer, to put pressure on officials from the Department of Trade and Industry. At the time, a bill to prevent investors from covertly acquiring large stakes in listed companies by acquiring their shares through shell companies was in the works. Three pages of correspondence revealed by The Guardian prove that the jurist relayed the Queen’s objection to this law.
A compromise offered to the queen
After a few weeks of reflection, the British government therefore proposed a compromise to the monarch. Secretary of State for Commerce Geoffroy Howe explained that he could insert a new clause in the bill, granting the government the power to exempt certain companies from the obligation to declare the identity of their shareholders. A change that would favor wealthy investors, namely heads of state, governments, central monetary authorities. And so the queen.
However, it took three years before this law was finally promulgated. In fact, in February 1974, Prime Minister Edward Heath called early elections, which resulted in the rejection of all laws submitted to parliament, recalls The Guardian. Eventually, the proposal was updated by Harold Wilson’s Labor government and the law enacted in 1976.
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