Ministers may face legal action over documents on Queen’s hidden wealth

theguardian.com:

Ministers could face contempt of court proceedings unless they respond to a request for documents that could reveal how the late Queen concealed part of her private wealth from the public.

Britain’s transparency watchdog, the information commissioner, has threatened legal action against the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS), which has stonewalled the request for two years.

It now has until the end of October to respond to the freedom of information request or it could face court action.

The documents may detail how the late monarch used a secretive financial facility to hide from the public the shares in commercial companies that she owned, along with the value of those shares.

The size of her personal fortune, including her investments, has never been disclosed to the public. Estimates regularly speculated that it could amount to hundreds of millions of pounds.

Last year the Guardian revealed how the Queen successfully lobbied the government to alter proposed legislation to prevent her shareholdings from being disclosed to the public.

As a result of her lobbying in the 1970s, the government created a state-backed shell company, Bank of England Nominees, which appears to have kept secret the Queen’s private shareholdings and investments for more than three decades.

Documents obtained by the Guardian show that other members of the royal family were able to use the same company to conceal their investments in companies. The identities of the other Windsors, along with the scale of their shareholdings, are alsounknown.

In 1973 the Queen dispatched her private lawyer to lobby the government to change a proposed law that would allow the public to establish who owned shares in specific companies. Her