UK government promises “property registration” to prevent investments by oligarchs
Boris Johnson’s government has unveiled a new plan to prevent oligarchs’ money from being used to buy UK property.
As the government moves to squeeze out Russian oligarchs in the wake of Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, Boris Johnson has vowed to speed up plans for a new public register, revealing the ultimate owners of properties across the UK.
The government had previously failed to act, despite the huge overseas leak known as the Pandora Papers which last year revealed details of 1,500 UK properties owned by secretive overseas companies, some of them connected to senior Russian figures.
The data showed that the family of Russian oligarch Mikhail Gutseriev, who was sanctioned by the UK, EU and US, had no interest in the assets).
In total, it has been estimated that £170bn worth of UK property is held overseas, much of it anonymously: either to avoid publicity, tax or worse. Many of these anonymous estates are concentrated in London, particularly in Westminster and Kensington.
Making their ultimate owners public is intended to help law enforcement agencies track down what Johnson called “dirty money,” but it will also increase transparency for civil society groups and journalists.
The new register will apply retrospectively to properties purchased up to 20 years ago in England and Wales, and from 2014 in Scotland. Entities that do not declare the beneficial owner will face restrictions on selling the property, and people who break the rules could face up to five years in prison.
It’s far from a new idea: the UK has had a publicly available register of beneficial owners for companies, the Register of Persons with Significant Control, since 2016.
The same approach is gradually spreading to Britain’s overseas territories, after intense campaigning by an alliance of MPs from across parties, including former Conservative development secretary Andrew Mitchell and former Labour minister Margaret Hodge.
The long-awaited registry of the property is a pending matter of an offensive that began almost a decade ago.
When the UK chaired the G8 in 2013, David Cameron told the global elite at Davos, the annual Swiss party for business and political leaders, that governments should “shine a light on corporate ownership, land ownership And where does the money flow? .
He spoke of wanting to address the “roving caravan of lawyers, accountants and financial gurus” who support the concealment of vast sums of wealth.
Three years later, in 2016, Cameron hosted an anti-corruption summit in London, at which he announced his intention to introduce a land registry.
“The new foreign company register will mean that corrupt people and countries will no longer be able to move, launder and hide illicit funds through the London property market and will not benefit from our public funds,” said a government press release in that moment.
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