<p><pre><code> Prime Minister David Cameron told a conference in
Singapore in July: "We are one of the most open and
welcoming economies anywhere in the world and I want
Britain to be that country. But I want to ensure that all
this money is clean money. There is no place for dirty
money in Britain."
</code></pre>
Based on this and other reports, it sounds like Cameron has a lot of work to do.<p>With motoring offences in the UK, if a car is fined the owner identifies the driver so the driver can be fined - and if the owner claims they "don't know who was driving", the owner gets the fine. So you can't dodge a fine or get a lesser fine by "forgetting".<p>We should apply the same logic to white collar crimes. If lawyers or corporate service providers are setting up companies with fake details, acting as directors then claiming they "don't know who controls the company", whatever punishments are due to the company's owners should transfer to whoever touched it last.
If you're interested in this sort of thing I can highly recommend a subscription to Private Eye magazine, which has been investigating dodgy shell companies and who they are really connected to for years.<p>(If you've never heard of Private Eye, it combines irreverent humour and hard-hitting investigative journalism, and has been the first to break many of the biggest stories in the British press)
I'm a little concerned to see company registration services demonized. I used one for my own company.<p>Like a domain registration they also usually provide anonymity by declaring themselves as your office address. That's legitimate too as many contractors don't have an office and don't want thier home address published publicly on the uk companies register. That isn't a fraud.<p>The BBC makes much of the weird ownership structure, but it is not that crazy. The structure described, 2 companies that basically represent people owning a company that basically does work is a tax efficiency. If the co owners own it directly and take thier money as pay not dividend, they pay more tax. If they take it as dividend not pay, it is split by ownership not hours worked. Better for both directors to be companies that charge the main company per hour for work done and then extract the dividend from those personal company seperately. I wouldn't do it as it has some problems like disguised employment but if compliant it is a tax efficiency not an evasion, and not a criminal activity.<p>I dunno, it's like saying a secure document destruction company is suspicious. It's just a company that provides a service that most users need to do normal productive business.
In Delaware, 1209 North Orange Street is the address of over 200,000 businesses including Silicon Valley giants like Google and Apple.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporation_Trust_Center_(CT_Corporation)" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporation_Trust_Center_(CT_C...</a><p><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/01/business/how-delaware-thrives-as-a-corporate-tax-haven.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/01/business/how-delaware-thri...</a>
> But they have never been to the Seychelles, and official Seychelles ink stamps used to register Fortuna United at Companies House in the UK were not sent from the islands.<p>> Zirnelyte says suitable stamps can be bought on the online auction site eBay.<p>How is a stamp from eBay an "official Seychelles stamp"? Does it just mean the stamps officially used by the Seychellois shell companies to "sign" things, rather than by the government of Seychelles? The way it was said sounds very fraudulent to me (even for a shell company mill), as if they forged the Seychelles registration docs. The image shown appears to be two bland stamps with the same design, each with a company name and a shared address in Seychelles (and from Googling the address, it looks like that's another company registration agent.)
Here is a short video introduction, if you were not aware of the scheme: <a href="https://youtu.be/KxsylnDO15w" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/KxsylnDO15w</a>
Scottish companies law is devolved. I should hope the Scottish Parliament could tighten up the rules on SLPs.<p>Interestingly "money laundering" is reserved, though.
In search for a cool pilfered billion, they haven't even made it past the first thin veil of LLPs?<p>What does it even mean to say that Fortuna Limited "has the rights to the billion dollars which disappeared last year"?
Interesting that a "Scottish Limited Partnership" doesn't appear to be the same thing as a Scottish LLP:<p><a href="http://www.brodies.com/node/1614" rel="nofollow">http://www.brodies.com/node/1614</a>