Revealed: Queen pushed for change in law to hide her private wealth | UK News

The Queen successfully lobbied the government to amend a bill to hide its “embarrassing” private wealth from the public, according to documents discovered by the Guardian.

A series of government memos discovered in the National Archives reveal that Elizabeth Windsor’s private lawyer pressured ministers to amend the proposed legislation to prevent their participation from being made public.

Following the intervention of the Queen, the government inserted a clause in the law giving the power to exempt companies used by “heads of state” from new transparency measures.

The agreement, which was drafted in the 1970s, was used to create a state-backed facade corporation that is understood to have placed a veil of secrecy on the Queen’s private holdings and investments until at least 2011.

The true scale of his wealth has never been revealed, although it is estimated to reach hundreds of millions of pounds.

The evidence from the monarch’s lobby on ministers was discovered by a Guardian investigation into the royal family’s use of a mysterious parliamentary procedure, known as the Queen’s consent, to secretly influence the formation of British law.

Unlike the better known procedure of royal consent, a formality that marks the moment when a bill becomes law, the Queen’s consent must be sought before the legislation can be approved by parliament.

It requires ministers to alert the Queen when legislation may affect the royal prerogative or private interests of the crown.

The royal family’s website describes it as “a long-established convention” and constitutional scholars tend to regard consent as an opaque but harmless example of the pomp that surrounds the monarchy.

But documents discovered in the National Archives, which the Guardian is publishing this week, suggest that the consent process, which gives the Queen and her lawyers an early look at bills coming to parliament, has allowed her to secretly lobby for legislative changes .

Thomas Adams, a constitutional law expert at the University of Oxford who reviewed the new documents, said they revealed “the kind of influence on legislation that lobbyists would dream of”. The mere existence of the consent procedure, he said, appeared to have given the monarch “substantial influence” over bills that could affect it.

‘Disclosure would be embarrassing’

The newspapers reveal that, in November 1973, the Queen feared that a bill to bring transparency to the company’s holdings would allow the public to examine its finances. As a result, she sent her private lawyer to pressure the government to make changes.

Matthew Farrer, then a partner at the prestigious law firm Farrer & Co, visited officials from the then Department of Commerce and Industry to discuss the transparency measures proposed in the corporate bill, which had been drafted by the Edward Heath government.

The bill sought to prevent investors from secretly accumulating significant holdings in listed companies by acquiring their shares through shell companies or nominees. Therefore, it would include a clause granting directors the right to require that any nominees who own shares in their companies disclose, when requested, the identity of their clients.

Three crucial pages of correspondence between government officials in the trade department reveal how, at that meeting, Farrer relayed the Queen’s objection that the law would reveal his private investments in listed companies, as well as their value. He proposed that the monarch be exempt.

“I spoke to Mr. Farrer,” wrote a public official named CM Drukker on 9 November. “As I remembered, he – or rather, I think his customers – are just as concerned with the risk of disclosure to company directors as to shareholders and the general public.

“He justifies this not just because of the risk of inadvertent or indiscrete leakage to others,” continued Drukker, “but more basically because revealing it to anyone would be embarrassing.”

After being told that exempting only the crown from the legislation would mean that it was obvious that any such anonymous participations were owned by the Queen, Farrer, the correspondence states, “was a little scared, emphasized that the problem was taken very seriously and suggested – somewhat provisionally – that we put them in this dilemma and, therefore, we must find a way out ”.

Drukker continued: “He didn’t like any suggestion that properties were not so embarrassing today, given the extensive knowledge, for example, of real estate. He also did not see that the problem could be solved by any evasion of interests in specific companies. It was the knowledge itself that was questionable. “

After being informed by Farrer “that he must now seek instructions” from his client, Drukker advised a colleague: “I think we should now do what you suggested we should do – warn ministers.”

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Three days later, another public official, CW Roberts, summarized the problem in a second memo.

“Mr. Farrer was not only concerned that the information about the shares held by the Queen and the transactions between them could become public knowledge (since they would appear in the company’s register) and, therefore, subject to possible controversy, ”wrote Roberts.

“He considers any disclosure of ownership of shares by the crown, even if restricted to company directors, as potentially embarrassing, due to the risk of leaks.”

He continued: “Mr. Farrer accepted the invitation to discuss the matter with us, but said that he will not be able to do so for a few days until he receives instructions from his directors.”

Confidentiality clause

The following month, the Heath government developed an ingenious proposal by which the Queen’s dilemma could be resolved.

“With the help of the Bank of England, my department has developed the following solutions, which will appear in the bill,” wrote Conservative Commerce Secretary Geoffrey Howe to a fellow minister.

Howe proposed that the government insert a new clause in the bill giving the government the power to exempt certain companies from the obligation to declare the identity of their shareholders.

Officially, the move would benefit a variety of wealthy investors. “This class could generally be defined to cover, say, heads of state, governments, central monetary authorities, investment councils and international bodies formed by governments,” continued Howe.

In practice, however, the Queen was clearly the intended beneficiary of the agreement. The government intended to create a shell company, through which several of these investors could hold shares. This meant that any curious member of the public would be unable to identify which shares owned by the company were held in the monarch’s name.

“My department discussed this solution with the Queen’s legal advisers,” noted Howe. “Although they cannot commit to using the suggested new facilities, they accept that it is a perfectly reasonable solution to the problem they face and that they could not ask us to do more. Therefore, I am making sure that the necessary provisions appear in the bill. “

It would take three years for the bill and its secrecy clause to become law. In February 1974, Heath called for a general election, resulting in the rejection of all legislation that was passing through parliament.

However, the proposal was revived by Harold Wilson’s subsequent Labor government and became law in 1976, with much of the original design simply copied in the second edition.

The exemption was almost immediately granted to a newly formed company called Bank of England Nominees Limited, operated by senior individuals at Bank of England, who was previously identified as a possible vehicle through which the Queen held shares.

The shares believed to be owned by the Queen were transferred to the company in April 1977, according to a 1989 book by journalist Andrew Morton.

The exemption is believed to have helped hide the queen’s private fortune until at least 2011, when the government announced that Bank of England nominees were no longer covered by it.

Four years ago, the company was closed. What exactly happened to the shares he held on behalf of third parties is unclear. As an inactive company, it never presented public accounts describing its activities.

‘A possible land mine’

The use of the Queen’s consent is normally recorded in Hansard, the official record of parliamentary debates, before the third reading of a bill. However, there is no notification of consent for the 1976 bill, possibly because it was requested only for the 1973 version, which never reached the third reading.

Howe, who died in 2015, appears to have revealed the role of the Queen’s consent – which is invoked when ministers believe a bill could affect the royal prerogative or private interests of the crown – during a parliamentary debate in 1975 in a speech previously unnoticed.

“In relation to this bill, like any other, the Queen’s advisers, as they routinely do, examined the bill to see whether it contained, inadvertently or not, any restrictions on the royal prerogative,” Howe said.

Howe was asked to speak in the parliamentary debate during a discussion caused by the leak of Whitehall high-profile newspapers to the Morning Star newspaper. The leak revealed the government’s intention to exempt Windsor’s wealth from the corporate bill.

It was an important scoop for the communist newspaper, but the leaked newspapers did not establish whether the queen had pressured the government to help hide her wealth.

At the time, the Financial Times noted that “a possible landmine for conservatives would be if Buckingham Palace in 1973 had taken the initiative to suggest that disclosure of the Queen’s holdings should be excluded from the bill.”

The newly discovered papers reveal just that. “At the very least, it seems clear that representations by the crown were important in changing the shape of the legislation,” said Adams.

When contacted by the Guardian, Buckingham Palace did not answer any questions about the Queen’s lobby to change the corporate bill, or whether she had used the consent procedure to pressure the government.

In a note, a spokeswoman for the Queen said: “The Queen’s consent is a parliamentary process, with the role of purely formal sovereign. Consent is always granted by the monarch when requested by the government.

“Whether the queen’s consent is necessary is decided by parliament, regardless of the royal house, on issues that would affect the interests of the crown, including personal property and the monarch’s personal interests,” she said.

“If consent is necessary, the bill is, by convention, submitted to the sovereign to grant only on the recommendation of ministers and as a matter of public record.”

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