Revealed: The Queen lobbied for a change in the law to hide her private wealth UK news

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

A series of government memoranda unearthed in the National Archives reveals that Elizabeth Windsor’s private lawyer has put pressure on ministers to amend the proposed legislation to prevent the disclosure of her participation to the public.

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

The arrangement, which was invented in the 1970s, was actually used to create a state-supporting corporation, which is understood to have placed a veil of secrecy over the queen’s private holdings and investments until at least 2011.

The true scale of her fortune was never revealed, although it was estimated to reach hundreds of millions of pounds.

Evidence of the lobby by the ministers’ monarchs was uncovered by a Guardian investigation into the royal family’s use of an arcane parliamentary procedure, known as the Queen’s consent, to secretly influence the formation of British law.

Unlike the more well-known procedure of royal approval, 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 is necessary for ministers to warn the queen when legislation could affect either the royal prerogative or the private interests of the crown.

The royal family’s website describes it as “a long-established convention,” and constitutional scholars have tended to view consent as an opaque but harmless example of the spectacle surrounding the monarchy.

But documents unearthed in the National Archives, published by The Guardian this week, suggest that the consent process, which gives the Queen and her lawyers an advanced look at bills entering parliament, has allowed her to secretly lobby for legislative changes.

Thomas Adams, a specialist in constitutional law at Oxford University, who analyzed the new documents, said he had revealed “the kind of influence on legislation that lobbyists would only dream of”. He said that the mere existence of the consent procedure seems to have given the monarch “substantial influence” on bills that could affect her.

“The disclosure would be embarrassing”

The newspapers show that in November 1973, the Queen feared that a bill to make the company’s holdings transparent could allow the public to examine their 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 civil servants in the then Commerce and Industry Department to discuss the transparency measures proposed in the companies’ bill, which was drafted by Edward Heath’s government. .

The bill sought to prevent investors from secretly building significant stakes in listed companies by acquiring their shares through front companies or candidates. It would therefore include a clause giving directors the right to require that any nominee holding their company’s shares disclose, when required, the identity of their clients.

Three crucial pages of correspondence between civil servants in the commercial department reveal how, at that meeting, Farrer conveyed the Queen’s objection that the law would disclose his private investments in listed companies, as well as their value. He proposed that the monarch be exempted.

“I spoke with Mr. Farrer,” a civil servant named CM Drukker wrote on November 9th. “As I recall, he – or rather, I think his clients – are as concerned about the risk of disclosure to a company’s directors as they are to shareholders and the general public.

“He justifies this not only because of the risk of inadvertent or indiscreet leakage to others,” Drukker continued, “but especially because the disclosure to anyone would be embarrassing.”

After being informed that only the crown exemption from the legislation would mean that it is obvious that any such anonymised shareholding was owned by the queen, Farrer, according to the correspondence, “was somewhat frightened, stressed that the issue was taken very seriously and suggested – somewhat tentatively – that we put them in this dilemma and therefore we need to find a way out. ”

Drukker continued: “He did not like any suggestion that the farms were not so embarrassing these days, given the wide knowledge of, for example, the landed properties. Nor did he see that the problem could be solved by avoiding stakes in certain companies. The knowledge itself was unacceptable. ”

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

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Three days later, another civil servant, CW Roberts, summarized the issue in a second memorandum.

“Mr. Farrer was not only concerned that information about the Queen’s shares and transactions with them could become public (because they would appear in the company’s register) and therefore be the subject of possible controversy,” Roberts wrote.

“He considers any disclosure of the actual ownership of the shares by the Crown, even if limited to the company’s directors, to be potentially embarrassing because of the risk of leakage.”

He continued: “Mr Farrer accepted an invitation to get into trouble with us, but said he would not be able to do so for several days until he received instructions from his directors.”

The secrecy clause

By the following month, the Heath government had developed an ingenious proposal by which the Queen’s dilemma could be solved.

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

Howe proposed that the government introduce a new clause in the bill that would give the government the power to relieve certain companies of the obligation to declare the identity of their shareholders.

Officially, the change would benefit a variety of wealthy investors. “Such a class could be broadly defined to cover, say, heads of state, governments, central monetary authorities, investment councils, and international government bodies,” Howe said.

However, in practice, the queen was clearly the beneficiary of the agreement. The government intended to set up a shell company through which a number of investors could hold shares. It meant that any curious member of the public would not be able to identify which of the shares held by the company were held on behalf of the monarch.

“My department has discussed this solution with the queen’s legal counsel,” Howe said. “Although, of course, they cannot commit to using the new suggested facility, they accept that it is a perfectly reasonable solution to the problem they are facing and that they could not ask us to do more. I therefore arrange for the necessary provisions to appear in the draft law. ”

It was three years before the bill and its secrecy clause came into force. In February 1974, Heath called a general election, resulting in the removal of all legislation passing through parliament.

However, the proposal was revived by the Labor government later under Harold Wilson and became law in 1976, with much of the original bill simply copied in the second edition.

The exemption was granted almost immediately to a newly established company called Bank of England Nominees Limited, operated by elderly people from the Bank of England, which was previously identified as a possible vehicle through which the queen owned shares.

The shares, which are 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 wealth until at least 2011, when the government revealed that nominations to the Bank of England were no longer covered by it.

Four years ago, the company was closed. It is not clear what happened to the shares he held on behalf of others. As a latent company, it has never submitted public accounts detailing its activities.

“A possible landmine”

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, no notice of consent for the 1976 bill appears in the file, possibly because it was requested only for the 1973 version which never reached third reading.

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

“In connection with this bill, as with any other, the Queen’s advisers, as they routinely do, examined the bill to see if it contained, by mistake or otherwise, any reduction of the royal prerogative.” , Howe said.

Howe had been urged to speak in the parliamentary debate during a line-up caused by the high-level Whitehall newspaper leak to the Morning Star. The leak revealed the government’s intention to exempt Windsor’s wealth from corporate bills.

It was a major piece for the communist newspaper, but the leaked newspapers did not determine whether the Queen lobbied the government to hide her fortune.

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

Newly discovered newspapers reveal just that. “At least it seems clear that the representations of the crown have been important in changing the form of the legislation,” Adams said.

When contacted by the Guardian, Buckingham Palace did not answer any questions about the queen’s lobby to amend the company’s bill or whether it used the consent procedure to put pressure on the government.

In a statement, a spokeswoman for the Queen said: “The Queen’s consent is a parliamentary process, with the role of a purely formal sovereign. Consent is always given by the monarch at the request of the government.

“If necessary, the queen’s consent is decided by parliament, independently of the royal household, in matters that would affect the interests of the crown, including the monarch’s personal property and personal interests,” she said.

“If consent is required, the draft legislation is, by convention, placed before the sovereign to be given only on the advice of ministers and as a matter of public record.”

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