British monarch Queen Elizabeth II had successfully lobbied the government to change a draft law in the 1970s to conceal her “embarrassing” private wealth from the public, says a cache of documents obtained by British daily The Guardian.
In an investigative report published on Sunday, the newspaper said a series of government memos unearthed in the National Archives revealed that Elizabeth Windsor’s private lawyer pressurized ministers to alter a proposed legislation to prevent her shareholdings from being disclosed to the public.
The British government, following the Queen’s intervention, inserted a clause into the law granting itself the power to exempt companies used by “heads of state” from new transparency measures.
The arrangement, which was concocted in the 1970s, was used in effect to create a state-backed shell corporation, which is understood to have placed a veil of secrecy over the Queen’s private shareholdings and investments until at least 2011, the report added.
It also said that the true scale of Queen Elizabeth’s personal wealth had never been disclosed, though it has been estimated to run into the hundreds of millions of pounds.
The Guardian investigation found evidence of the monarch’s lobbying of ministers into the royal family’s use of an arcane parliamentary procedure, known as Queen’s consent, to secretly influence the formation of British laws.
Unlike the better-known procedure of royal assent, a formality that marks the moment when a bill becomes law, Queen’s consent must be sought before legislation can be approved by parliament, the report added.
The consent procedure also requires ministers to alert the Queen when a legislation might affect either the royal prerogative or the private interests of the crown.
The website of the royal family describes it as “a long established convention” and constitutional scholars have tended to regard consent as an opaque but harmless example of the pageantry that surrounds the monarchy.
However, documents unearthed in the National Archives suggest that the consent process, which gives the Queen and her lawyers advance sight of bills coming into parliament, has enabled her to secretly lobby for legislative changes, the report said.
The papers reveal that in November 1973 the Queen feared that a proposed bill to bring transparency to company shareholdings could enable the public to scrutinise her finances, and thus dispatched her private lawyer to press the government to make changes.
The bill sought to prevent investors from secretly building up significant stakes in listed companies by acquiring their shares through front companies or nominees, the newspaper said.
It would, therefore, include a clause granting directors the right to demand that any nominees owning their company’s shares reveal, when asked, the identities of their clients.
