Companies House, my virtual Russian squatter and me
CYNTHIA O’MURCHU , 30 June 2021
If Britain’s company registry is to be believed, my family and I have been sharing our dwelling with a Russian in his mid-forties. For a time, our place doubled as an office for his start-up, which he set up last year, and in which he is the sole shareholder.
The trouble is, it’s not true. We have never heard of “the Russian”. But evicting our virtual squatter turned out to be complex — and costly.
Trawling through public records is the backbone of my work as I follow global money flows searching for evidence of financial fraud or accounting acrobatics. So I’m aware that records at the UK corporate registry, Companies House, contain errors and lies.
Dubious filings abound on the registry. Was Christ, Jesus Holy with a residence in Heaven truly a director of Weight A Minute Limited for a year? Why has a dormant company — most recently named M.A.D Group Limited — changed its name nearly 250 times since it was set up six years ago before it was voluntarily struck off?
These are just some of the oddities that Graham Barrow, an anti-money laundering expert and host of the Dark Money podcast, has come across. “It’s really difficult to know what are crimes of commission and crimes of omission,” Barrow says. “Is it deliberate or accidental?”
Britain has long attracted criminals who want to launder money and abuse of the corporate registry is rife. Research by Transparency International has catalogued at least 929 UK shell companies used in corruption and money laundering cases which it estimates could cost the global economy as much as £137bn.
