These 52,000 properties are often found in upmarket areas of central London: Kensington, Belgravia, Chelsea. And they are all in the hands of quasi-anonymous companies. 18,000 companies in total have therefore not complied with the new requirements of British law. Total value of these buildings, houses or apartments: seven and a half billion euros. The Transparency International report, titled, not without humour, “Through the Keyhole”, “Par le trou de laclave”, is published on Tuesday February 7 and lists different concealment techniques, summarized in thirteen pages.
Often, the montages are so opaque with so many front companies that it becomes impossible to trace them back to the source. At the heart of the system: tax havens, such as Jersey or the British Virgin Islands. In other cases, there is simply a lie: the real owner is not the declared owner. Or even more astonishing: there is, officially, no owner. More than 2,300 cases of this kind: the public limited companies which bought have no official beneficiary.
20% of the total in the hands of Russian oligarchs
And so there are many Russians among the alleged owners. This is the case for about 20% of these properties, a fifth of the total, for a value exceeding 1.5 billion euros. The financing circuits, specifies Transparency International, go back to oligarchs close to the Kremlin, even though they are supposed to be subject to sanctions. The NGO does not give names. But we know that London had been renamed Londongrad in recent years, due to the omnipresence of Russian billionaires. One thinks in particular of Roman Abramovich, the former owner of the Chelsea football club. He left London with an Israeli passport, not without bequeathing many of his properties to his children. The report names, on the other hand, other political leaders or important businessmen: the Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev, the Nigerian businessman Igho Saromi, the former Angolan Vice-President Manuel Domingos Vicente, or the Belarusian Serguei Sheiman , son of the right arm of the potentate Alexander Lukashenko, Putin’s main ally. Transparency also evokes the royal families of the Gulf, Emirates, Saudi Arabia. Each time, the banking arrangements are quite baroque.
A law on transparency not respected
Implicitly, Transparency International therefore also denounces a certain passivity of the British authorities. After the start of the war in Ukraine in March last year, with drums and trumpets, the United Kingdom changed its law on the funds of the oligarchs by forcing them to be transparent. This declared will was accompanied by a few brilliant strokes, for example the arrest last December, in London, of a figure of the Russian oligarchy: Mikhail Fridmann, owner of the Alpha group, suspected of money laundering . London claims to have already seized the equivalent of twenty million euros among the property of these Russian billionaires. But this report shows it: in half of the cases, the new law was not respected. The intransigence of facade is not followed by the facts. Anti-money laundering investigation units are often confronted with armies of lawyers and accountants. In any case, for Transparency International, the result is there: the United Kingdom remains “a hub of dirty money”.