Selling England by the offshore pound

[Martin@AS Financial]

Interesting read from Private Eye. It shows how many properties are foreign shell company owned down every street.

Private Eye | Official Site - the UK's number one best-selling news and current affairs magazine, edited by Ian Hislop

[_V_]

Our last great industry. Money laundering the global criminal's hard earned, through the state backed property scam.

[BrilloPad]

So far Epping forest looks safe. Will there be a battle for it?

[AtW]

Stamp duty very high now on such purchases. I think there is annual fee too.

[AtW]

Our last great industry. Money laundering the global criminal's hard earned, through the state backed property scam.

It's in danger now because alleged criminals are being taxed on buying property in UK now...

[Martin@AS Financial]

Cut and pasted from the linked Private Eye article - Neighbours from hell:


An Examination by the Eye of British properties frozen by law enforcers and the courts reveals some of the world’s most questionable operators channelling fortunes into property while attempting to hide behind tax haven companies. Even a limited search reveals 125 freezing orders over properties held by offshore companies on behalf of some unsavoury characters.

Ziad Takieddine, a Lebanese businessman at the centre of the corruption scandal that engulfed the French presidency of Nicholas Sarkozy, owns Warwick House, a mansion in Holland Park thought to be worth more than £17m, via a British Virgin Islands company. Takieddine brokered numerous arms and oil contracts in the Middle East on behalf of the French state. While under investigation by French authorities in 2013, Takieddine, an uncle of Amal Clooney, admitted to paying bribes to an aide of Sarkozy’s and was banned from leaving the country while authorities investigated his role in the “Karachi affair” of illegal arms sale to Pakistan in the 1990s. He also came under investigation after he was found with €1.5m in cash on a private flight out of Libya in March 2011. Just the man to be welcomed with open arms by London’s estate agents.


One case examined by the Eye exemplifies how the financiers of Middle Eastern violence exploit offshore secrecy to evade sanctions. Soulieman Marouf, a British-born Syrian businessman, was added to the EU sanctions list in 2012 after the Times exposed his links to the Assad regime. He reportedly acted as the London fixer for the Syrian ruling family, purchasing expensive jewellery and clothes for the president’s wife Asma and buying sniper rifles on the black market for the regime.

Marouf, whose portfolio of high-value properties in London’s West End were frozen in 2012 by the Treasury, succeeded in lifting the order last year following a challenge in a European court. But he’s not out of the woods yet. According to Land Registry data, at least one property – a flat in Fulham where he is listed as residing on the UK electoral roll but owned via a BVI company called Gardinia Enterprises Ltd – is still subject to a Treasury freezing order.


Back in 2011, Eye 1286 reported how Erastus Akingbola, the then head of Nigeria’s Intercontinental Bank (which was funded partly by Britain’s international development fund CDC), was being chased through the UK courts over £7m of misappropriated funds, much of which was used to buy properties using offshore trusts and companies. The claims were successful and an apartment in Cambridge Gate, the opulent row of apartment blocks overlooking Regent’s Park, owned in the name of an Isle of Man company remains subject of a freezing order obtained by the bank.

Intriguingly, members of the Al Gosaibi family caught up in the Middle East’s biggest ever corporate collapse, of the banking and trading conglomerate taking their name that failed in 2009, own five high-end properties on Grosvenor Square, Mayfair, using BVI, Jersey and Liberian companies. All have been frozen in proceedings brought by creditors. The “walls of corporate secrecy” that David Cameron promised to break down still form a fortress around London’s offshore-owned real estate and prevent the true owners of most properties linked to shady dealings being identified. What can be teased out is none too appetising.

[AtW]

It's the unsavoury characters in the Parliament who are a real worry, they are the ones who made laws that allowed all this tulipe...

[DodgyAgent]

Right Dodgy lot they are

[darmstadt]

There is one thing to learn from this, don't have a foreign sounding name when buying property through tax havens

[Martin@AS Financial]

Ushers and butlers … how fawning politicians welcomed world’s rich

Interesting story from the Guardian:

‘Ushers and butlers’ … how fawning politicians welcomed world’s rich | UK news | The Guardian