Queen Elizabeth II, who died this Thursday (8) at the age of 96, has amassed a personal fortune estimated at 370 million pounds (R$ 2.2 billion), according to an estimate published this year by the newspaper The Sunday Times. She has followed a royal lifestyle, paid for by the taxpayer — but the royal family makes its own private business, the details of which are not known.
An annual government grant, called the Sovereign Grant, is charged with covering the official expenses of the Queen and other members of the royal house who represent her. During the 2020-2021 fiscal year, it reached £86 million, of which £34.4 million was used for renovations to Buckingham Palace in London.
The amount is equivalent to 15% of the profits made by the Crown Estate, a financial portfolio that includes land, real estate and other types of assets, such as wind farms, which are owned by the Queen but are managed independently. The net income is transferred to the British Treasury, according to an agreement sealed in 1760.
Last year, the Sovereign Grant was provisionally raised to cover the expenses of the Buckingham renovation. The money is also used to pay the hundreds of employees who work for the royal household.
The British monarch’s private income, called the Privy Purse, comes mainly from the site in the Duchy of Lancaster owned by the royal house since the Middle Ages. Its assets comprise land, financial investments and properties, in an amount of more than 500 million pounds (R$ 3.01 billion).
Privy Estate comprises 315 residences, commercial establishments in central London and thousands of hectares of farmland. Its net income for the 2020-2021 financial year was over £20m. Elizabeth gave part of this amount to her family and paid taxes on the money not used for official tasks.
“The Queen uses this money to pay her personal expenses to maintain the Balmoral residences. [onde ela morreu nesta quinta] and Sandringham, which is very costly,” David McClure, author of a book on the Queen’s finances, told AFP. The two residences are privately owned by Elizabeth II. “She also uses part of this money to subsidize other members of the royal family who do not receive public or Sovereign Grant money.”
Among the recipients of these grants are his children Anne, Edward and Andrew. The latter no longer performs royal functions and therefore will not receive as generous a share as in the past. The prince has fallen out of favor because of his closeness to American financial adviser Jeffrey Epstein, who was accused of sexually exploiting minors before committing suicide in prison.
Although most of the royal palaces belong to the Crown Estate, the Queen had two private residences: Balmoral Castle in Scotland, valued at an estimated £100 million, and the country house at Sandringham, in Scotland. valued at half that value. Both are not maintained with public resources.
She also held items from the Royal Collection in a personal capacity, including a stamp collection that belonged to her grandfather estimated at £100 million.
The queen’s great passion for racehorses has also won her more than £7 million in prize money, according to calculations by a specialist website, which excludes the animals’ costly upkeep. The Crown Jewels, valued at 3 billion pounds (R$18 billion), symbolically belong to the queen, but are automatically transferred to her successor – now King Charles III.
Despite her fortune, the queen was left out of the list of the 250 richest people in the UK, compiled by the Sunday Times and headed by businessman Leonard Blavatnik, with a net worth of 23 billion pounds (R$ 139 billion).
It is still small when compared to other monarchies: that of the Thai royal family is estimated at between US$ 50 billion and US$ 70 billion (R$ 261 billion and R$ 365 billion), while the wealth of Saudi King Salman reaches US$ $18 billion (R$94 billion).
In a recent controversy, the Duchy of Lancaster appeared in the so-called Paradise Papers, secret documents that were leaked in 2017 following an investigation by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. The documents revealed that Elizabeth II, through the duchy, would have deposited 10 million pounds (R$ 60.3 million) in the Cayman Islands and Bermuda, British overseas territories considered tax havens.
The UK has a special legal clause that exempts the incumbent monarch from paying inheritance tax — it will apply to the now King Charles. Sovereign-to-sovereign inheritance is exempt from the 40% inheritance tax, as agreed in the days of former Prime Minister John Major in 1993 to prevent the shrinking of the royal family’s wealth.
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