A judgment in Europe awards billions to a forgotten Filipino monarchy

There exist few easier ways to become filthy rich than by ruling a patch of Borneo, Asia’s largest island. It is there that the Sultan of Brunei sleeps every night in the world’s biggest residential palace. Ponder, then, the opportunity missed by the Sultanate of Sulu, an archipelago in the southern Philippines (see map), which for centuries stretched far enough west to be Brunei’s neighbour. Today its former slice of Borneo is the Malaysian state of Sabah, and much of the money from the oil pumped there ends up in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia’s capital. Descendants of Jamalul Kiram II, the last sultan of Sulu, who died in 1936, have had to settle for more modest lives.