LONDON - The scandal surrounding disgraced former prince Andrew has thrust the British royal family and its opaque finances into the spotlight, with a parliamentary probe due in the coming months.
It marks a significant shift towards greater scrutiny of royal matters after decades of deference to the centuries-old monarchy.
Parliament's Public Accounts Committee will later this year launch an inquiry after reports that Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor had been paying only a token "peppercorn" rent on Royal Lodge, a 30-room mansion on the Windsor estate, since he moved in in 2003.
Andrew finally left the property on Monday following a new flood of scandalous emails released by US authorities last week which revealed excruciating details of his close ties to convicted US sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
King Charles III last year stripped his younger brother of all royal titles and honours, amid growing outrage over Andrew's friendship with Epstein.
The Windsor estate is managed by the independent property company, the Crown Estate, a commercial business that operates separately to the government and the royal household. It is not the monarch's private property, and its profits go entirely into the public purse.
The date of the parliamentary inquiry is not yet known, but in a letter to the Crown Estate, the committee chairman Geoffrey Clifton-Brown said MPs were "concerned" whether the lease arrangements for Royal Lodge were "achieving the best value for money".
"Any reduced income ... reduces the Crown Estate's annual surplus and therefore would be a cost to taxpayers," he added, asking a series of questions about the arrangements.
The inquiry "marks a shift in the constitutional balance between parliament and the monarchy," said Francesca Jackson, a PhD researcher focusing on the constitutional monarchy at Lancaster University.
"For a long time, the monarchy has escaped scrutiny, but things are changing," she told AFP.
Norman Baker, a former Liberal Democrat MP, agreed Andrew's situation has "opened the door" to greater questioning of the monarchy.
His new book "Royal Mint, National Debt: The Shocking Truth about the Royals" examines "the real cost" of the monarchy to British taxpayers.
The Sovereign Grant, the annual public subsidy to working royals, has risen dramatically since 2011, when the funding formula was changed to link it to Crown Estate profits.
Currently, the royal family receives back from the Treasury 12 percent of the Crown Estate's profits.
"The official grant was £7.9 million a year in 2011. Fourteen years later, it's £132.1 million. You don't have to be a Republican to find that sort of increase obscene," Baker told AFP.