I’m sorry to say Charles’ aides have handed republicans a fillip — and should hang their heads

MUCH of what has so far emerged from the so-called Paradise Papers about the tax affairs of the super-rich has been rather predictable.

The news that the racing driver Lewis Hamilton allegedly claimed back £3.3 million VAT on a private aircraft costing £16.5 million was interesting, but not very surprising.

Equally, few eyebrows will have been raised at the revelation that Apple supposedly moved a subsidiary containing vast amounts of untaxed offshore cash to Jersey in order to minimise its tax liability. We already knew that the tech giant likes to pay as little tax as possible.

But what really took me aback was the extraordinary revelation that members of the Royal Family have been investing significant sums of money in offshore tax havens.

First, we discovered that £10 million of the Queen’s private money from the Duchy of Lancaster has been invested in the offshore tax havens of the Cayman Islands and Bermuda. Some of this went into a stake in BrightHouse, a consumer lender accused of targeting low-income people with astronomical interest rates.

It goes without saying that Her Majesty knew nothing of these investments, which were rashly made by her advisers. What on earth were they up to, putting the Queen in a potentially invidious position?

Among these careless advisers was Sir Mark Hudson, chairman of the council of the Duchy of Lancaster, which provides income for the sovereign. It is an exquisite irony that he should have received his knighthood at Buckingham Palace this week.

Personally blameless though the Queen undoubtedly was, her few detractors will have made hay. The republican Jeremy Corbyn quickly suggested that she, among others, should apologise for using overseas tax havens if the purpose was to avoid taxation in the UK. THEN, hard on the heels of a story which has regrettably given a fillip to the republican cause, came the news that Prince Charles’s Duchy of Cornwall has also allegedly been dabbling in an offshore company. The difference is that in his case it seems possible, if not likely, that he was aware of what was going on.

Charles apparently lobbied to alter climate change policy not long after a secret investment by the Duchy of Cornwall of £86,000 in a Bermuda-based company called Sustainable Forestry Management Ltd (SFM) in 2007.

The Duchy of Cornwall, by the way, gave the Prince an income of £20.5 million last year on which he pays full income tax after his business-related costs have been deducted. Somewhat controversially, the Duchy pays no corporation tax or capital gains tax.

A director of SFM when the investment was made was Charles’s close friend, the since deceased Hugh van Cutsem. The company was in the business of trading carbon credits, a financial instrument intended to create an incentive for environmentally friendly behaviour.

The point is that SFM wanted to trade carbon credits in rainforests but was largely prohibited at the time.

It reportedly sent lobbying documents to the Prince’s office after the Duchy had bought its stake. Weeks later, the Prince delivered a speech calling for international treaties to be changed.

It is, of course, possible that Charles was unaware of the lobbying by SFM — or indeed that the Duchy of Cornwall had invested in the company — and simply made a speech which happened to coincide with its viewpoint. He is, after all, passionately interested in climate-change issues.

The trouble is that this admittedly rather tangled tale is open to the interpretation that, whether knowingly or not, Prince Charles was using his position to promote the interests of a company in which he indirectly had an investment.

In the opinion of Sir Alistair Graham, former chairman of the Committee on Standards in Public Life, there appears to have been a ‘serious conflict of interest’ between the Duchy’s investment in SFM and the Prince’s public statements.

That Charles is an entirely honest and upright person is not in question. Nor can there be any doubt that, when he made that speech urging for the extension of carbon credits to rainforests (which in due course happened), he spoke from the heart. In October 2007, he launched a project that addressed the same issue.

The problem is that a republican who had the time to delve into this complex affair could make the Prince look less than straightforward by stressing his friendship with Mr van Cutsem, an SFM director. The existence of this warm relationship gives some credence to the notion that Charles knew about the Duchy’s investment in the company.

The Duchy of Cornwall’s website emphasises the Prince’s hands-on approach in running the Duchy. Even setting aside his friendship with Mr van Cutsem, isn’t it likely that an active Prince obsessed with climate change would have known about an investment in a company trying to alter climate change rules? I’m afraid it does not look terribly good.

Any anti-monarchist — who, deep in Jeremy Corbyn’s office, may even now be digging into the details — might also point out the Duchy of Cornwall sold its stake in SFM only a year later, in June 2008, for a profit of £160,000. HOW much damage has been done? My guess is that this tale is so labyrinthine that Prince Charles’s critics will have a hard job in whipping up a great public indignation, though I could be wrong.

In any event, there is surely a lesson here to be learned. Any reasonable person would say that if Charles insists on making public statements on any issue — as he so often does — he must be absolutely certain that he does not have any conceivable prospective financial benefit.

The sad truth is that whereas in the case of investments in offshore tax havens made on behalf of the Queen it is possible to pin the blame entirely on half-witted advisers, it is not so easy in the case of Prince Charles to exclude him from all responsibility.

According to the Paradise Papers, the Duchy of Cornwall also made a separate investment of £2.96 million in four investment funds in the Cayman Islands. If the Prince is as hands-on as the Duchy’s website says he is, shouldn’t he have known about those ill-advised deals?

The remedy is simple enough. The Duchy of Lancaster and the Duchy of Cornwall should stop making offshore investments which, if discovered — as they have been by a freakish leak — are bound give rise to the suspicion that tax is being avoided, or secrets hidden.

After all, the Royal Family is already massively rich. Both duchies produce huge income streams. The Queen and Prince Charles need advisers who make transparent, ethical and publicly defensible investments on their behalf which can be easily explained to the man supping his pint in the Dog And Duck.

In the end, most people will shrug their shoulders in despair, but without surprise, when they learn that American multi-national companies and shady billionaires are not paying their full share of tax.

But the Royal Family? They must be above all suspicion, and play by the same rules as ordinary citizens. The revelations of the past few days have very slightly undermined our assumption that they do. That is why the Queen and Prince Charles’s advisers really should hang their heads in shame.