Paris robbery prompts £3m insurance payout to Royal Collection

A dramatic daylight robbery at a museum in Paris last year has resulted in an insurance payment of over £3m to the Royal Collection Trust, after two royal items were stolen while on loan to an exhibition.

The figure has been revealed in the Royal Collection Trust’s annual accounts, showing the scale of the loss from the raid on the Cognacq-Jay Museum in Paris last November.

Robbers smashed display cases and took items from an exhibition of 18th Century luxury miniature items.

The haul included two historic, richly-decorated snuff boxes on loan from the UK’s Royal Collection.

Media reports at the time of the robbery last year claimed there had been losses of around a million euros – but a figure of £3,020,000 is shown in the annual report of the Royal Collection Trust as an insurance receipt, outlining this is “in respect of snuff boxes stolen whilst on loan to the Musée Cognacq-Jay”.

The trust, a charity that looks after the paintings, sculptures, furniture and jewellery in the Royal Collection, says in the report published on Tuesday that the money “will be placed into a designated fund to be used for the enhancement of the collection”.

The two stolen items from the Royal Collection are believed to be a snuff box with a cameo of the Birth of Venus, thought to have been made in Germany in the 18th Century, and a Fabrique Royale snuff box, made in Germany in the 18th Century, and encrusted with nearly 3,000 diamonds.

The Fabrique Royale box had belonged to the Russian royal family before being seized by the Soviet authorities in 1917. It was later bought in 1932 by Queen Mary, wife of George V.

The French newspaper Le Monde reported that the robbery had been perpetrated by four masked raiders who pulled up on scooters and then used an axe to break into display cases, in front of shocked visitors at the museum.

As well as the stolen items on loan from the Royal Collection there were also exhibits from the Louvre museum and the Palace of Versailles in France.

The trust’s annual report also showed record numbers of visitors to Buckingham Palace last year during its summer opening.

There were 683,000 visitors, with more of the Palace being opened to visitors and for an increasing number of days. The East Wing, which overlooks the Mall, has been renovated and opened to tourists for the first time.

But the biggest attraction remains Windsor Castle, which had almost 1.4 million visitors during 2024-25.

Altogether there were 2.9m visitors to the royal palaces and exhibitions, with ticket sales contributing to an income of almost £90m, which produced profits of almost £14m.

Among the ways of improving access this year has been £1 tickets for people on Universal Credit and a range of other benefits, with 19,500 of these tickets being sold in four months at Windsor Castle and the Palace of Holyroodhouse in Edinburgh.