NEPAL will launch the biggest investigation in its history to track down and seize King Gyanendra’s estimated £1 billion family fortune this week.

For a man once revered as a living god, Gyanendra has suffered a series of humiliations at the hands of Nepal’s politicians since mass protests forced him from power last April. His face has been removed from bank-notes, he is no longer head of state or commander-in-chief of Nepal’s army and he has no ceremonial functions as a constitutional monarch.

Now parliament is preparing to strip him of the vast royal estates and shareholdings that he received after his brother, King Birendra, was murdered by Crown Prince Dipendra in the palace massacre of 2001, which wiped out most of the senior members of the Shah dynasty.

Gyanendra has been given until tomorrow to declare his palaces, estates, hotels, overseas properties, family art and jewellery collections and cash deposits in Nepal and Switzerland.

Nepal’s prime minister and cabinet colleagues tracking the king’s property have warned that full disclosure may be Gyanendra’s last chance to save the monarchy.

According to Gopal Man Shrestha, the planning minister, the prime minister has said that if the king declares all his assets and agrees to pass the crown to his grandson, the main parties would agree to a “safe landing” for the monarchy.

Nobody in Nepal expects the king to respond. He has ignored letters from ministers requesting an inventory of his holdings.

Shrestha vowed to unleash the full power of the state to hunt down assets. Nepalese embassies in Britain, Switzerland, India, Dubai and America would join central bank officials and civil servants in the search.

A national campaign would be launched in which the king would be shown as a fugitive, with an appeal for his subjects to pass information to the authorities. “It will be terrible for him and bad for Nepal if he does not cooperate,” the minister said.

Gyanendra was a rich man when he became king, having used his position to build holdings in hotel chains, tobacco factories, spice and tea plantations and car and truck dealerships.

It was his decision to claim his brother’s estates and transfer them to his own name after he seized power in 2002 that has caused anger. He did not apparently give any of the proceeds to good causes in his brother’s memory, a Nepali tradition.

The new parliament’s interim constitution states that all Birendra’s wealth taken by Gyanendra will be nationalised.

Birendra owned the Gokarna palace, a royal shooting lodge now leased to an international hotel chain, the lakeside summer palace overlooking the high Himalaya at Pokhara, and forest and mountain estates. There are royal palaces at Bharatpur, Hetauda, Nuwakot, Lamjung, Ghorka and Bhaktapur, and residences in 15 other districts. In fact there are so many that Gyenendra has more than 400 servants, paid from government funds, to look after them.

When land registry officials began investigating the properties they found that before he became king he owned just four acres at his personal palace at Nirmal Niwas. Afterwards his estate grew to 50,000 acres.

According to Surya Thapa, whose book The Economics of Royalty will be published this summer, the king’s land and property is worth just under £1 billion. His portfolio includes the Gokarna golf and spa resort just outside Kathmandu, which he leased to the Meridien group; the Annapurna hotel estate, leased to the Taj group; and the Soaltee hotel, which is leased to the Crowne Plaza chain.

“He also has shareholdings in 35 companies, including a power station, a cigarette factory, a tea garden and a katha spice plantation. I estimate these to be worth £108m,” Thapa said.

When Gyanendra became king, he asked for and received a substantial increase in his royal allowance, from £867,000 a year to just under £5m a year. The government also bought him bullet-proof Rolls-Royce, BMW and Jaguar limousines.

According to Thapa and the commentator Aditya Man Shrestha, the Shah dynasty was poor by royal standards when it reasserted its rule in 1951. But because it was not subject to the law, it was free to line its pockets by looting temple idols and smuggling gold and products from threatened animals.

According to Thapa and Shrestha, the king also receivesa cut of just under £750,000 from Britain’s payments to Nepal for the services of the Ghurkas.

According to Shrestha, Gyanendra’s best hope of survival is to follow the model of some Indian maharajahs, who became interim governors after their royal fiefdoms were abolished. Gyanendra could be an interim president pending elections, he said. The problem is nobody can make any offers to the king until after an assembly is elected in June to write a new constitution.

Will the king give up his wealth before he knows what the future holds? “He won’t cooperate,” said Thapa, “and that makes the abolition of the monarchy even more likely.”

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