The Queen, it turns out, is an investor in Bright House, the household goods rental company that was recently described as "not a responsible lender" by the Financial Conduct Authority.
Bright House is known for levying steep interest rates, and was forced to repay £14.8 million to almost 250,000 customers, many of whom are financially struggling families.
The revelation that the Queen makes money out of this highlights what many of us are increasingly aware of – that the idea that people in "developed" countries are living in advanced democratic societies is just surface gloss. The age of feudalism never really went away and most of us are unwittingly still yoked to it, a fact that is concealed behind a mass of complex financial practices devised by the smartest accounting brains.
I suspect that the Queen herself is probably not aware of the intricate details of her financial portfolio, and that most of the Royals are little more than puppets living in a gilded cage.
The monarch's links with Bright House were revealed as part of the so-called Paradise Papers, a leak of financial documents, publicised by a consortium of investigative journalists from the BBC, the Guardian and the Süddeutsche Zeitung.
The documents reveal how massive cash funds are invested in offshore tax havens for the super-rich – most of it apparently legally. The rich can afford the smartest accountants to manage this for them, while the rest of us have to stump up significant portions of our income in tax, much of which will be going towards overseas wars and crony schemes to manage public services.
Most of us are too busy trying to make ends meet to even think about these issues. We think if it's legal it must be OK.
It's just the thin end of the wedge, but the fact that some of the poorest people in society are contributing on a weekly basis to feather the nest of possibly the richest person in the world, whether or not she is even aware of that fact, suggests to me that as a society we haven't progressed much further than the days of Dickens.
Photos by Rept0n1x at Wikimedia Commons and Ricardo Stuckert/PR, Agência Brasil.