The royal family appears to have appropriated two sets of stamps that were official state gifts, incorporating them into an extraordinarily valuable private stamp collection that King Charles inherited from his mother.
The gifts, a mint collection of historical Canadian stamps and a rare set of stamps from Laos, were formally given to the royal family as state gifts. They appear to have been subsumed into the royal philatelic collection (RPC), a private trove of rare stamps estimated to be worth at least £100m.
