The UK has a Register of Companies. It's run by Companies House - an agency of the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS).
BIS is the government department that has for years been seeking to do itself out of business by removing as much business regulation as possible - in the process promoting every opportunity it can for cheats to prosper in the country.
Companies House has been subject to staff cust of more than 25% as a result.
My research showed in 2009-10 they lost touch with more than 300,000 of the companies they were meant to regulate - and so simply struck them off rather then try to do anything about it.
Now it's become apparent that they aren't capable of regulating the formation of companies either. As the BBC has reported today with regard to the freezing of assest fo former members of the corrupt Egyptian government:
The publicly accessible Companies House register reveals that one of those named on the sanctions list, Naglaa al-Ghazaerly, wife of the former housing minister, was able to register a company in her own name in London in November 2011, seven months after her assets were ordered to be frozen.
Companies House simply does not regulate. It doesn't even chase forms well. So the law is broken. Sanctions are not upheld. Crime happens. Tax is not paid. And all because governments have an obsession with de-regulation.
That's the price to society of neoliberalism.
Hat tip: Raveem Ismail
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I have always been a critic of Companies House and resigned from one of its Focus Groups .But its lack of regulation is little to with “de regulation”. Companies House is mainly a database, it has never (effectively) regulated. Mind you,saying that, it is still more effective than almost all the Company Registars in the world where they hardly bother to regulate at all.
One consequence of this is to breed some nasty little rackets in a number of things. We have seen people who are very vulnerable being preyed on by someone with multiple companies many of which do not submit accounts and are then just struck off. As when listing ends for whatever reasons any compliance issue ceases to be and there are no accounts it is impossible to trace either monies or activities of the person in question and associates. Inevitably, it is all done “on legal advice” without any reference to the actual law.