Ideal to acquire instant credibility

April 19, 2016 1:01 AM

Public discussion about offshore tends to focus on the Seychelles, the British Virgin Islands or Panama: sunny places for shady people; remote countries full of dodgy money. But if 29 Harley Street tells us anything, it is that offshore isn’t a place, it’s an idea. Formations House is about as offshore as a place can be, and our government appears powerless to bring it back onshore again.

Writing in The Guardian, Oliver Bullough looks into Formations House and its premises at 29 Harley Street, which house 2,159 companies. "Why," Bullough asks, "has this prestigious address been used so many times as a centre for elaborate international fraud?"
posted by Sonny Jim (11 comments total)

Because obviously it sounds somewhat less scammy than having an address in an already well known dodgy tax haven type place?
posted by MartinWisse at 2:25 AM on April 19, 2016

Hey, wait, wasn't this a plot point in Accelerando?
posted by Mimir at 2:25 AM on April 19, 2016 [1 favorite]

So many important stories breaking in the last few weeks in The Guardian!
posted by maggiemaggie at 5:19 AM on April 19, 2016

Crooked Crook Crook Limited is a wholly owned subsidiary of Arbitrary Name Ltd, itself a part of Spurious LLC, registered in Delaware.
posted by longbaugh at 5:35 AM on April 19, 2016 [4 favorites]

Prestigious address. Cheesy website...
posted by jim in austin at 5:41 AM on April 19, 2016

To be fair, their new website is a lot more swish, but less ... forthcoming than their old one, which is why I linked to it in the FPP.
posted by Sonny Jim at 5:44 AM on April 19, 2016

An equally important question is how such complete rubes managed to be walking around with hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars that they were willing to just give to anyone who looked the part.
posted by Ickster at 6:03 AM on April 19, 2016 [1 favorite]

3.5 million companies in the UK, 585,000 new companies formed each year. I wonder what the death rate of companies is, and how long it will be until there are more companies than people.
posted by clawsoon at 6:46 AM on April 19, 2016

The claim is that making companies as easy as possible to set up encourages entrepreneurship. But if you're someone who only has the energy to set up a company if it takes 9 minutes and costs £15, do you really have the energy to build a successful company?
posted by clawsoon at 7:01 AM on April 19, 2016 [1 favorite]

Surprised at the snark on the article. It's documenting the same essential fraud as the Panama Papers or any of a zillion Nevada corporations. Creating corporations is making it far too easy to defraud the world. Hiding stolen money, avoiding income taxes, creating a shell company to scam someone. It's embarrassing that the UK's laws help enable that kind of fraud. (And the United States, and...)

The VAT fraud described about halfway through is particularly surprising, because UK corporate law is being used to steal from the UK treasury. You'd think someone in the UK would be interested in cracking down on that. OTOH the UK's prime minister himself has business wrapped up in dodgy shell companies, so maybe the corruption is just part of acceptable practice?
posted by Nelson at 8:25 AM on April 19, 2016 [2 favorites]

You'd think someone in the UK would be interested in cracking down on that.

As someone pointed out in the Panama Papers thread, it does seem kind of weird that most of the locations used for this are British or American protectorates, either in law or in fact. Go through the list of British Overseas Territories, and count how many of them with at least a few thousand people people are tax havens.
posted by clawsoon at 11:59 AM on April 19, 2016