King Charles’s Charity Paid Camilla’s Sister Tens of Thousands in Undisclosed Consultancy Fees

The King’s Foundation is once again facing questions about transparency, governance and the unusually blurred line between royal family relationships and charitable business.

According to new reporting by The Sunday Times, the charity has been paying Queen Camilla’s sister, Annabel Elliot, tens of thousands of pounds for consultancy work involving “branding” and “retail.” The foundation did not identify the arrangement in its published accounts under related-party transactions. The charity also reportedly spent days refusing to explain how Elliot had been appointed before confirming her consultancy after reporters approached Buckingham Palace.

However, the latest Duchy of Cornwall accounts, detailing the incomings and outgoings of Prince William’s first full year as Duke of Cornwall, reveal that for the first time in almost two decades, Ms Elliot was not paid for her services during 2023-2024.
The report simply repeats a line from the previous year’s accounts, which concerned Charles’s last six months at the helm and then his elder son’s first six months, after he inherited the estate on the death of Elizabeth II.

The Telegraph

Sources told the newspaper that Elliot’s role appeared to extend beyond ordinary retail advice, including accompanying King Charles on official visits involving the foundation and keeping him informed about internal developments.

That would be uncomfortable enough for any charity. For the King’s Foundation, it lands on top of years of questions about money, access and governance.

The King’s Foundation Has Faced Governance Questions Before

The Metropolitan Police previously investigated Charles’s charitable network over allegations that figures connected to the foundation offered help with honours and British citizenship to a wealthy Saudi donor, Mahfouz Marei Mubarak bin Mahfouz. The investigation ultimately ended without charges, but the scandal still prompted resignations, internal investigations and intense scrutiny of the charity’s leadership.

The investigation ended without charges, and no court found that Charles personally knew of or participated in any offer involving honours or citizenship.

Then there were the extraordinary cash donations. Charles personally accepted €3 million in charitable donations from a former Qatari prime minister, reportedly delivered in a suitcase, a holdall and a Fortnum & Mason carrier bag. And again, the Charity Commission did not find evidence that the donations themselves were unlawful. Clarence House said the correct processes were followed, but a senior royal source later said such donations would not be accepted today.

And the governance concerns did not disappear with the headlines. In 2025, Scotland’s charity regulator criticised former officials of the King’s Foundation for inadequate decision-making, poor record-keeping and weaknesses in oversight during earlier donor dealings.

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Another Family Connection Raises Fresh Questions Over Transparency

Now another member of the royal family’s immediate circle has quietly appeared on the charity’s payroll. The issue is not simply that Camilla’s sister received consultancy work. Charities hire consultants all the time. The question is why a charity so closely associated with the monarch, already carrying this much baggage around donors and governance, apparently failed to make such a sensitive family-connected arrangement transparent from the beginning.

For an institution built around King Charles’s philosophy of “harmony,” the finances surrounding his charitable world continue to produce a remarkably discordant pattern.

The Sunday front pages tell their own story. While The Sunday Times was reporting that King Charles’s charity had paid Camilla’s sister tens of thousands in consultancy fees without listing the arrangement in its related-party disclosures, other papers pushed Harry and Meghan, Harry versus William and even Princess Diana. We cannot prove they were deliberately trying to bury the story, but the contrast is hard to miss. Once again, the Sussexes dominate the headlines while uncomfortable questions around Charles and Camilla sit elsewhere.

The Real Scandal Is How Familiar This All Feels

What bothers me most about this story is how familiar the pattern feels. According to the reporting, the arrangement came to public attention after people close to the foundation raised concerns with The Sunday Times. Without that internal pushback, would anyone outside the organisation have known that Queen Camilla’s sister was receiving tens of thousands of pounds in consultancy fees at all?

That is the part I keep coming back to. This is not some tiny family business where everyone shrugs and says, “well, of course they hired a relative.” This is a high-profile charity tied to the monarch, connected to public life, and already carrying years of baggage over governance, access and money. In that context, undisclosed payments to the Queen’s sister should have set off every possible alarm bell.

And yet here we are again. People keep saying Charles never learns, but maybe the real issue is that institutions like this rarely face consequences serious enough to force change. Scandals erupt, statements are issued, someone resigns, the temperature drops, and eventually another questionable arrangement surfaces. And bonus points if they can scapegoat Harry and Meghan instead.

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When Royal Nepotism Barely Makes the Front Page

The family connection only makes the lack of scrutiny more striking. Annabel Elliot is not some random outside consultant. She is Queen Camilla’s sister, and Elliot began working for the Duchy of Cornwall as an interior designer after Charles married Camilla in 2005. She remained on the Duchy payroll for almost two decades, receiving payments that the Duchy publicly recorded as related-party transactions. When William took over the estate, her paid role ended. Now she has resurfaced as a consultant for Charles’s foundation, where the arrangement was not listed in the same way in the charity’s public accounts.  

And she is not the only member of Camilla’s family whose proximity to Charles has raised questions. Her nephew Ben Elliot faced “cash-for-access” allegations after businessman Mohamed Amersi said Elliot’s luxury concierge company helped arrange an intimate dinner with Charles after Amersi had paid thousands of pounds a year for elite membership. Amersi later donated more than £1.2 million to Charles-linked charities. Elliot denied that he sold access to Charles.  

That does not prove some grand family conspiracy. But it does make the media silence harder to ignore. Professor Jason Arday held no royal or government office, yet sections of the press subjected him to relentless scrutiny while commentators warned that DEI represented institutional corruption. Meanwhile, an actual royal charity can pay the Queen’s sister, fail to list the arrangement among its related-party transactions, and receive far less front-page attention.

Final Thoughts

If a government minister quietly placed a close relative into a paid role and failed to disclose the relationship properly, the conflict-of-interest questions would be immediate and relentless. The royal family should not get a softer standard simply because the money flows through a charity rather than a department.

And if reports are correct that Prince William had previously ended Elliot’s paid work for the Duchy of Cornwall before she later appeared in a paid consultancy role at Charles’s foundation. At some point, this looks like a culture that assumes scrutiny can always be managed after the fact.