London, Thanasis Gavos

It is estimated that the personal fortune of King Charles in Britain has risen to 1.8 billion pounds (2.04 billion euros), according to an analysis by the Guardian newspaper.

The newspaper has for weeks launched an investigation leading to a series of publications regarding “the cost of the crown”.

As he reports in today’s publication, the monarch’s personal wealth is largely hidden from public scrutiny and impossible to determine with precision.

However, the research team believe they have managed to make the first detailed record of the king’s assets, from country houses and diamond jewelery to paintings by famous artists and Rolls-Royces, racehorses and rare stamps.

The fortune of the 74-year-old, who will be crowned on May 6, was multiplied, the newspaper writes, when he inherited his mother Queen Elizabeth’s fortune, while also benefiting from an exemption from the obligation to pay inheritance tax.

A Buckingham Palace spokesman downplayed the Guardian’s investigation as a “creative mix of speculation, arbitrary conclusions and inaccuracies”.

The figure of £1.8 billion is more than three times the estimate in the latest Rich List compiled each year by the Sunday Times.

Among other things, Charles’ fortune is said to include luxury cars worth £6.3m, without it being entirely clear which of the 23 cars of the royal house (Rolls-Royce, Bentley, Jaguar) are his private property.

He also owns, apart from other castles and palaces that do not formally belong to him but to the crown, reportedly the royal estates at Balmoral in Scotland and Sandringham in Norfolk in eastern England. Their total value is estimated at 330 million pounds.

Charles also owns around 70 racehorses, worth at least £27m.

In addition, it is considered the holder of the best philatelic collection in the world, with rare stamps some of which have been offered as gifts by foreign governments. The value of the collection is estimated at 100 million pounds.

The paper points out that some “official” gifts to the royal family that Charles has inherited may have been included in the list of “personal” gifts, as the split was only made official in 1995.

Among these cases are mentioned some of the 400 paintings in the royal collection, some by painters such as Monet, Dali, Chagall. The value of 60 of these paintings valued by experts amounts to at least 24 million pounds.

Where the lines between official and personal gifts are even more blurred is in the case of jewelery and precious stones. 54 jewels of the private estate are valued at 533 million pounds.

The value of the shares which the Guardian believes are owned by the King and his family is £142m.

The so-called “Duchy of Lancaster”, a collection of properties across the UK worth £653m, brings the king around £20m a year.