Legal loopholes are used to obscured the ownership of two-thirds of English and Welsh properties held by foreign shell companies
and Wales controlled via overseas shell companies are not public, despite the rules that came into force on 31 January, according to the report published on Monday by researchers from the London School of Economics and Political Science , the University of Warwick and the Centre for Public Data.
Yet legal loopholes are used to obscure the ownership of the vast majority – 87% – of the properties, the analysis found. Between 6% and 9% were owned by companies that had ignored the law requiring them to sign up to the registers, while the rest had “out-of-date or poorly documented records”, the authors said.
The analysis found that trusts were used to hold property in 63% of those with obscured overseas ownership. Trusts allow one person to hold property for the benefit of another, often a family member, but they can also conceal ownership because they do not have to be registered in the same way as companies. Trusts have been found to have been used extensively by Russian oligarchs, whose property holdings have been revealed in some cases only thanks to leaks of private data.
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