How the British royal family managed to keep their properties secret

In the British royal family, discretion is a cardinal value. This also applies to wills. The members of the royal family were thus able, by derogation from British law, to keep the contents of their assets secret. The Guardianwho investigated the matter, estimates the amount of these wills to be 187 million pounds (219.5 million euros), based on declassified government files.

Jewels, properties, money, the nature of these inheritances has never been revealed to the public, so these goods have been able to be redistributed without any proof “to relatives, friends or employees”, evokes the Guardian.

“The Queen’s Dignity”

The newspaper hired in November 2021, legal actionand appealed last January, to “challenge a decision to exclude the media from a hearing, where it was decided to uphold the will of the duke of edinburgh“, passed away in April 2021. The will of Prince Felipe, the most recent of the royal family, is thus sealed for 90 years to, according to the High Court judge, preserve “the dignity of the queen”.

“I have chosen, due to the sovereign’s constitutional position, to follow a special procedure with respect to royal wills,” Justice Andrew McFarlane announced at the time. She herself ignores the content of the text.

The case returns to court from this Wednesday and should allow, according to the left-wing newspaper, to draw attention to “the secrecy surrounding a dark exemption granted to the royal family.”

controversial practice

The newspaper thus assures that “for decades, the lawyers of the royal family obtained court orders from the judges of the Supreme Court so that the content of the wills remained confidential after the death of the parents.”

According to guardianthe derogation requests, legally obtained by the royal family, allowed to hide what was contained in the assets of the “The Queen Mother“, mother of Queen Elizabeth, or her sister, Princess Margaret, both of whom died in 2002, the Duke of Windsor, the queen’s uncle who briefly reigned as Edward VIII before abdicating in 1936, as well as some thirty members of the family, since 1911.

A controversial practice, when we know that the wills of ordinary mortals are made public after their death, to avoid fraud and warn the beneficiaries.