Offshore in central London: the curious case of 29 Harley Street | Hacker News Reader

Offshore in central London: the curious case of 29 Harley Street

theguardian.com

94 pointssergeant329 comments

Here's the list of all companies at 29 Harley St.[1] If you want to find accommodation addresses for companies in the UK, you can download the entire Companies House database for free and start analyzing.[1] I've done a little of this for SiteTruth, but it's possible to do a lot more.

The UK is much more open with this info than most US states. Some states have good info, such as CA and NY, and, surprisingly, FL. Nevada and Delaware, though, operate their state corporation registries like offshore tax havens.

I'm amazed that anyone would do a large transaction without buying a Dun and Bradstreet report. Business backgrounds are checkable.

[1] https://cse.google.co.uk/cse?cx=partner-pub-6032163821936851... [2] http://download.companieshouse.gov.uk/en_output.html

Thanks. I didn't know about that full data download.

For more in-depth information (e.g. company accounts), you can go here: https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/help/welcome

This information is all on the public record, but was previously only available on payment of 1 pound per document. Now this trial service makes it available for free.

D&B on private companies is useless. The data is all self reported and verified with insiders.

> Astute Partners had to declare its shareholder, but that shareholder was a trust in Liechtenstein, which does not reveal company ownership, so the declaration was meaningless.

I'm inclined to think the blame here lies with Liechtenstein much more than it does with the UK.

Likewise with the final conclusion and the Seychelles. Short of disallowing foreign ownership of British corporations, what more can we do than insist that ownership is disclosed and hope that other countries will do the same?

Simple: require that beneficial owners (humans) are listed on the title at the Land Registry. These can be private but they must be real. No name, no sale.

The Land Registry registers land, not companies. Companies house registers directors, but not owners. There is no general register of company ownership, and to create one would obliterate the bearer share (which may well be a good idea) and impose registration transaction costs.

I'd favour a more direct approach of simply banning UK nationals from having anything to do with companies in tax havens at all, from Panama to the Isle of Man. No loopholes, no registers to dig through, confiscation if found.

Land reform in Scotland is working on the "beneficial owner" aspect: http://news.scotland.gov.uk/News/Transparency-of-land-owners...

Understood, and thanks. I misunderstood the context - I was just referring to ownership of the building, rather than all the companies registered there.

That will never happen, considering most of the 0% tax havens are British crown dependencies. A lot of the money that is held in these "offshore" entities is actually parked in London, for who is wondering.

Actually, Companies House does require that private companies ("limited by shares") file an annual statement listing all their shareholders. It's the "AR01" form and is available for free under the Filing History tab on a company's page - e.g. this is one of the companies mentioned in the article: https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/05292775/filing-h...

This doesn't force the disclosure of beneficial ownership though. Shares can be held by nominees without that being disclosed on the register. If the shareholder is an offshore company that can also be difficult to trace.

Another fun fact: it's possible to work out the exact most recent valuation of a UK-registered startup by reading its SH01 filing (when it issues new shares). I'm always surprised that the tech press doesn't do this as a matter of course given how excited they get about funding announcements...

>I'd favour a more direct approach of simply banning UK nationals from having anything to do with companies in tax havens at all

Which would make things very awkward, because the United Kingdom is commonly thought of as a tax haven in EU.

(Companies in other EU countries are conducting business in London. Obviously they are doing it for tax avoidance purposes!)

> banning UK nationals from having anything to do with companies in tax havens at all

What if I buy a few shares in a publicly traded overseas company, and that company in turn buys a few shares of a company based in a tax haven? Short of making the UK an insular economy, this is not going to happen.

My take would be that the ease of setting up a business in the UK is a great thing for the business people, the general public, and the economy. It is sad that people end up with debts that will never be repaid when a company folds, but without the institution, there would be much lesser chance of a cheap product, gainful employment, or profit in the first place. When a company shields criminal activity, the courts readily bring the people behind it to justice, as the fine article itself mentions. The only going concern seem to be the undertaxation stories repeatedly reported in the press — good rage fodder for the financially illiterate, but they never hold much water under scrutiny.

Im in the UK - but this sort of thing must be quite common. There was an instance in Scotland -

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-34445201

Which was linked to a $1Bn fraud in Moldova

I had been reading that as Richard Branson instead of Benson for most of the article. Was very confusing.

This is almost a perfect straight from template Graun piece.

1) Take something which is routine and well known to everyone except the Guardian's reader demographic (hysterically uneducable middle class outrage junkies).

2) Find an example of someone abusing it.

3) Blame it on Thatcher.

4) Profit!

3 is becoming increasingly tedious and of course when 4 actually happens, GMG are careful to use offshore vehicles to avoid paying any tax on it, which is OK when they do it, because reasons[0]

Guardian columnist strikes me as one of those middle class jobs at risk of being 'decimated' by cheap AI.

[0] http://www.theguardian.com/help/insideguardian/2011/feb/22/b...

Not only that, but the Guardian is owned by a charity as part of an inheritance tax dodge in the first place.

http://order-order.com/2009/02/06/tax-justice-protest-agains...

Isn't it also now in the US rather than the UK after the Security Services embarrassing Snowden-hard drive sledgehammer incident?

it is becoming a bit tiresome. Simply head over to /r/unitedkingdom and i'm quite sure you will find people using it to paint anyone who owns a home or has non trivial PAYE fiscal dealings as satan itself.

Disclaimer: I'm a Graun reader, make of that what you will.

1) and 2) are largely a definition of a newspaper's purpose, educating their readers on something they don't know about. They also don't purely blame it on Thatcher, they make it clear that every government since Thatcher's has made this easier. They even single out 2001 as a key year in this process.

I'd also wager a large portion of the population don't know how easy and legal it is to create companies with no traceable actual human being responsible for their conduct.

Private Eye has been banging on about this for years thanks to Richard Brooks, but that's not exactly mainstream. (See "Where there's muck, there's brass plates" https://privateeye.subscribeonline.co.uk/Products/digital-ed... )

I'm aware of their purpose, and I'm not against it. Merely pointing out what a good example this particular article is of them having extracted a reusable pattern. The Guardian has always been an activist paper driving page views with outrage and this model has translated well into the digital age. They're very good at it.

PE and Brooks, of course, were famously wrong about e.g. Vodafone who it turned out were in fact tax compliant. Like the Guardian.

I slightly raised my eyebrows when you called the guardian 'activist' because all papers are political in the UK. I would have said that the their news pieces (not the comment pieces obviously), while not free of bias, are amongst the least biased in the UK. Also you say that they drive page views with outrage, all headlines are click bait to a certain extent or they would be crap headlines, but the Guardian is nowhere near as guilty of outrageous headlines and recycled stories as the Daily Mail, Sun, Mirror, Express etc

Whilst everyone knows that corporate fraud and shell companies exist, it's highly unlikely that many know about the specific details mentioned in this article. And calling a whole group of people "hysterically uneducable" is laughably hypocritical in itself.

As for "find [..] someone abusing it", they also showed that the abuse was quite significant.

And for your claims about GMG tax avoidance, I'm not sure how you can say that with a straight face about 29.4%.

Given that GMG never make a profit I'd be interested in where that 29.4% came from. To my knowledge they pay very little tax as they're loss making.

That aside they make well documented use of tax havens which per their rhetoric is BAD EVIL RICH COMPANIES AVOIDING tax so yeah, I do feel it's well hypocritical.

I think judging someone based on the tools they use to structure their tax focuses on the wrong thing, though it can help point us in the right direction on the worst offenders. The final end result (effective total rate paid [1]) is what matters, and for GMG it's about the same as you or I.

[1] globally and across a long period of time, ofc

Both the Grauniad and the Torygraph have got a bit cliche with more of their pieces. I suspect this is a function of the move online. Back in the days of newsprint I'd often alternate to give myself a somewhat wider point of view.

Meanwhile at the Torygraph

1) Take something which is routine and well known to everyone except the Torygraph's reader demographic (hysterically uneducable free market junkies).

2) Find an example of someone abusing it.

3) Blame it on Labour esp Corbin or The EU

4) Profit!

3 is becoming increasingly tedious

You've basically enumerated "how newspapers work".

It's worse at the Torygraph, they've gone all in on buzzfeed SEO lists. "40 things to know before you're 40" and the like. They're a bit behind the curve with leveraging the Twitter outrage mob for clicks, probably because hardly anyone ever manages to read to the end of one their articles without dying of boredom.

The Grauniad's not exactly a fan of Corbyn either.

I know a little about UK company law and company formations - what with running a company and all - but I had no idea that it was possible for a company to be a director and secretary of another company, or that it was so easy to bypass normal reporting and ownership requirements with shell games like these.

I'm fairly sure the details will be news to most small business owners in the UK. It's the kind of insider loophole wrangling that's only available to people who know the right lawyers and accountants. It's not at all obvious from online searches, even if you're investigating offshore and/or holding companies.

So dismissing people who learned something from this piece as "hysterically uneducable middle class outrage junkies" is self-indulgent virtue signalling. It's simply factually wrong.

"... the Guardian's reader demographic (hysterically uneducable middle class outrage junkies)."

People who make sweeping derogatory generalisations like this are all idiots.

"a Dutch shipping company named Allseas"

Rather, a Swiss-headquartered offshore pipelay company

Reply on news.ycombinator.com