Yesterday I noted that 3 million people in the UK own at least 5.7 million offshore bank accounts according to HMRC.
Overnight Global Witness issued the press release I reproduce below, based on Land Registry records.
£100 billion of UK property may be owned offshore to avoid tax, or hide ownership. This may be to assist money laundering, and to defeat inheritance laws. Or to hide money from spouses, creditors, or both.
Whatever the reason, there is abuse behind this statistic.
I hate to say it, but offshore is still alive and it's kicking far too hard. The campaigns need to go on.
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£100bn of property in England and Wales is secretly owned, estimates show
London, 17 March 2019 - New Global Witness analysis reveals that over 87,000 properties in England and Wales are owned by anonymous companies registered in tax havens. The value of these properties is at least £56 billion according to Land Registry data - and likely to be in excess of £100 billion when accounting for inflation and missing price data(1).
Tomorrow, anti-corruption NGO, Global Witness, is giving evidence to a parliamentary committee, as it considers proposals to introduce a register of the real owners of UK properties and hears evidence on the impact of property ownership by anonymous companies. The Government committed to introduce a register of UK property owners at the Anti-Corruption Summit in 2016, but progress has been slow.
“It's increasingly clear that UK property is one of the favourite tools of the criminal and corrupt for stashing and laundering stolen cash. This analysis reveals the alarming scale of the UK's secret property scandal” said Ava Lee, Senior Anti-Corruption Campaigner at Global Witness.
“There's some good news. Tomorrow, Parliament is reviewing a draft law that could force these secret owners out of the shadows. We're calling on the Government to table this legislation as quickly as possible, so we can find out who really owns so much of the UK.”
40% of the anonymously owned properties identified are in London. Cadogan Square in Knightsbridge, where the average property will set you back over £3 million, hosts at least 134 secretly owned properties. Buckingham Palace Road is also home to a large number, with an estimated value of £350 million.
As of March 2019, the areas with the highest number of anonymously owned property are:
- 10,000 in Westminster, right on the government's doorstep;
- 5,729 in Kensington and Chelsea;
- 2,320 in Camden; and
- 1,930 in Tower Hamlets.
Global Witness investigations have repeatedly shown how criminals and corrupt politicians can use the UK property market to hide or clean dirty cash, and to secure safe haven for themselves and their families. And they've shown how London can be used by anyone wanting to hide their identity behind complex networks of companies and properties.
In 2015 the anti-corruption NGO revealed how the mystery owner of a £147 million London property empire owned via a network of offshore companies could be linked to a former Kazakh secret police chief accused of murder, torture and money-laundering.
/ENDS
Notes to editors:
- This analysis uses Land Registry data accurate as of 1st January 2019. The dataset used is the Overseas Ownership dataset, it is available free of charge from the Land Registry. It contains information on leaseholds and freeholds in England and Wales owned by non-UK registered companies. All properties described as “anonymously owned” are owned by at least one company registered in a “secrecy jurisdiction”. A country is considered to be a secrecy jurisdiction if it has a secrecy score of 60 or above in the Tax Justice Network Financial Secrecy Index. Price paid data is available for only 30% of the titles. In order to estimate the value of the titles for which there was no pricing information, we adjusted for inflation and used the median for region and tenure.
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All a result of free movement across Europe including capital coming mainly from Eastern Europe.
How do you know?
Please elaborate when no one knows who actually does own the companies in question
The law to disclose beneficial ownership of UK property has already been passed – it’s specifically designed to deal with this!
And because of likely levels of fraud it is not
Huh! Sounds like a classic example of “don’t let the facts get in the way of my prejudices!”, aka “Anything to do down FoM and Eastern Europe.
Steve says:
“All a result of free movement across Europe including capital coming mainly from Eastern Europe.”
Steve says: Blame the Russians
Nice one, Steve.
Now pull the other one….it has bells on. 🙂
@Steve 12.58 pm.
How are you spelling ” bElls” . Surely wrong vowel.
I am not surprised by any of this.
In my personal experience this country is full of Guardian readers who bitch and moan about the state of it whilst hiding their cash from the tax man.
Its called hypocrisy and its the UK’s second largest output after the first which is the lie that we are still a major force in the world and can stand alone.
“London, 17 March 2019 – New Global Witness analysis reveals ….”
New ? This isn’t news. The only thing that’s new here is that maybe ‘somebody’ is coming, at long last, to realise that there’s a problem waiting to blow-up in their faces. And that maybe it’s too big to keep ignoring it.
The thrust of this stems from the Tax Justice agenda, and the work done on that, doesn’t it ?
Making headway. 🙂
Re the “1 in 10” title of previous post – the 3 million noted is about 1 in 20 by population.
The other HMRC figure
It is one in ten of taxpayers
I can offer a little insight as chair of a “residents’ association” of a premium development in central London (non-residents’ association would be a more accurate description).
Flats in our building are 70% owned by non-resident owners, mostly living outside the UK. This is a very typical figure for blocks like ours (I have compared notes with dozens of similar associations representing similar blocks). A minority of these are owned by offshore companies with concealed ownership, probably about the average for Westminster (11%; see https://www.private-eye.co.uk/registry).
A few were owned by Greeks who “sold” their properties to BVI companies. In one case the company name invoked the name of a well known ghost ship, a snook cocked at the Greek taxman perhaps in advance of EU data exchange by tax authorities. I believe there are many billions of missing Greek taxes invested in London property.
I have little doubt that what is true of some Greeks is also true of Russian, Nigerian and various other nationalities represented.
The burden of all this both on the communities deprived of their taxes but also on the London resident taxpaying neighbour. First, there is a profound impact on property prices. This means, eg, that the people we employ in our building commute a very long way to work as people on modest incomes are priced further and further out of the capital. Second, the effect is corrosive also for the owner-occupying minority who, because of the disengagement of investor owners, are at the mercy of corrupt, crooked landlords whose business model depends largely on exploiting a vast array of conflict of interest scams.
It’s possible for leaseholders to take control of the management of their buildings and free themselves from much of the predation but it’s not easy, and it’s VERY difficult when 70% of the “owners” (leaseholders) are uncontactable, as is often the case. Needless to say, landlords avoid sharing contact information, invoking the data protection act if asked (spuriously, since a) it doesn’t apply to companies and b) leaseholders have a legal right to the information; a so-called Section 11 notice will elicit it, but if one doesn’t know this one is at a disadvantage).
These landlords are regular and substantial donors to the Conservative party, who have in effect been bribed to leave things as they are. It’s a similar story with the housebuilding industry. The govt introduces a help to buy scheme. CEOs of companies like Persimmon make obscene sums of money £120m in one case, and then the housebuilders donate a few million to the Conservative party–to support “free enterprise”, but all with taxpayers’ money.
From my perspective the London property business is riddled with outright corruption, conflict of interest and incompetence unlike anything I’ve ever seen anywhere else (I have lived and worked and owned property in several countries).
Very interesting – and I concur on the outcomes.
I would describe the situation as typically ‘laissez-faire’. The apartment blocks springing up all over London are not designed to offer London’s indigenous population affordable housing – that is for sure.