Andrew Kersley writes:
The Esplanade isn’t much to look at. Just 800 metres long, the street in St Helier, Jersey, is a mixture of nondescript low rise new builds that block out the view to the nearby docks. It’s home to the island’s only bus station, as well as tyre shops, budget cafes, run-down Indian restaurants and skeezy nightclubs — all occasionally interspersed with the odd luxury apartment or understated office block.
It’s also where 2,224 of London’s most expensive and recognisable properties are all registered to. At least, that’s according to the official records.
While it’s well-known to the average Londoner that every inch of this city — from cavernous super-basements to the air above Canary Wharf offices — has become a prized asset for offshore investors, what hasn’t been known is who those investors are. Due to lax regulation, it’s been near-impossible to find the real owners of these buildings, who often hide behind firms registered in foreign tax havens like Jersey. In fact, much of who owns our city has long been utterly opaque.
But now, The Londoner can reveal that some 32,611 properties in London are owned by overseas entities. We can do this because a recent change in the law is forcing these foreign companies to register their real owners. We’ve spent the last week, using data compiled and shared with us by Dan Neidle of Tax Policy Associates, to go through thousands of those overseas entities to see who has bought up properties in the capital.
What we found was startling: a story that concerns some of London’s most iconic pubs, Camden market, President Trump’s golf buddy and even an Oxford Street Harry Potter store whose landlord is seemingly the sanctioned Libyan government.
The street that owns London
So why are thousands of London properties owned via tiny companies on a non-descript street in Jersey? Let me explain. Say, hypothetically, you’re a businessman who wants to buy a small slice of Oxford Street or Soho, but you’re not too keen on taxes or transparency.
Well, instead of purchasing it in your own name, the easiest solution is to set up a shell company — or use a management firm — to buy it in a tax haven like Jersey, where ownership of companies doesn’t have to be declared. While you still actually control the property, on all publicly accessible records there’s no way to trace it back to you.
And that’s how you end up in the situation where 432 London properties — mostly apartments in two luxury blocks in Canary Wharf and Greenwich Peninsula — can be run from companies all registered from one single address: 28 Esplanade. The building is an office that’s home to JTC, a fund management firm. But many of the addresses are little more than empty shells with a shared, overfilled P.O. box. After all, the companies registered to them don’t need to do anything operationally, other than being a name on formal documentation; a go-between for a wealthy aspiring landowner and the London land they so badly crave.
It’s a problem that has been a major hurdle for The Londoner before. Back in August last year, we were looking into controversial billionaire developer Asif Aziz, who we had been told was responsible for the closure and redevelopment of beloved pubs across the capital. But tracking his footprint was next to impossible, as his empire of properties is not primarily run through his public firm Criterion Capital — but through dozens of holding companies, most of which are registered in the Isle of Man, another tax haven.
The system began to change somewhat in 2022. While the practice wasn’t outlawed, the government passed a new rule mandating that any overseas entities that owned UK real estate had to register their real ownership with UK authorities. That disclosure allowed Dan Neidle and the Tax Policy Associates to create a database of all of those properties that they released in January. After seeing their stellar work, we reached out, and Neidle very kindly offered to share the vast swathes of raw data with us.
Finally, we were able to pull back the curtain on the capital’s overseas landlords.
Who owns Oxford Street?
The size and scale of these multi-billion pound mega property empires is almost impossible to get across in full; a web that criss-crosses the entirety of the city. Instead, it’s easier to illustrate its sheer magnitude by looking at one small sliver. A single road, in fact: Oxford Street.
London’s première shopping destination is a notoriously strange beast. It’s one of the most famous streets in the world, with some of the most valuable real estate in the city. Yet ever since the decline of its giant department stores in the mid-to-late twentieth century and the rise of internet shopping, the street has been a problem that London can’t quite solve (though with his plans for pedestrianisation, Sadiq Khan hopes to). Who, precisely, is Oxford Street for these days? Who wants to be there, other than gaggles of French teenagers who don’t seem to understand “excuse me”, despite the phrase being near-identical in their own language?
The answer, it turns out, is overseas billionaires — and foreign governments, investment firms, corporations and pension funds. In fact, as our map shows, a large proportion of Oxford Street is owned by shell companies registered overseas (for the purposes of this exercise, we excluded Tottenham Court Road, New Oxford Street and any of the alleys and courts off the main drag). Many of its most recognisable buildings, often old department stores that take up entire blocks, are owned by entities registered in Jersey, Guernsey or the British Virgin Islands.
This new data reveals that their ultimate owners are often thousands of miles away: the Private Department of the President Of UAE, say, or the Qatar Central Bank. There’s also the Libyan Investment Authority, the sanctioned sovereign wealth fund based in Tripoli whose enormous property (484 to 504 Oxford Street) is currently the home to knock-off Harry Potter shop Wizards and Spells, where morose Dobby dolls stare out alongside an array of generic tourist memorabilia.
While some of these offshore owners are both benign and unsurprising — Uniqlo owns the Uniqlo store, Nike owns the Nike store — others have simply not complied with the new regulations to disclose. And still more have circumvented disclosure by wrapping their ownership structures in such complicated networks of shell companies, asset managers and charitable trusts that it’s impossible to find out who the real owners are.
Often, an Oxford Street property will be just one piece of a larger London property empire. Dig around Stl Ptc Uk (No 2) Limited, the “real owner” of Orosi (Oxford Street Limited) — which owns multiple Oxford Street properties, including the Dr Martens store at 192–194 Oxford Street — and you’ll find that name listed as a trustee for the Samuel Tak Lee charitable trust, founded by billionaire Hong Kong real estate developer, Samuel Tak Lee. Reportedly worth $3.7bn, Tak Lee has an extensive portfolio of property holdings in London, including the colossal Shell Centre redevelopment on South Bank.
If you look just south to Soho, the picture isn’t much better. There are some 459 different properties in or on the borders of Soho owned by foreign entities. They range from the luxury fine dining of Noble Rot — whose Soho site is owned by Cypriot property moguls Hermioni Khenkin and Marios Hadjiroussos (both of whom appear in the Panama Papers) via a Virgin Islands company — to gay pub the Admiral Duncan which, despite being owned by the English pub chain Stonegate, is managed through a holding company in the Cayman Islands.
This is a familiar tactic for Stonegate, and one that they use throughout the capital. In fact, out of the 13 pubs we found in Soho that are owned by offshore entities — including classics such as the Kings Arms and the Shakespeare’s Head — nine of these were owned by Stonegate through its Cayman Islands shell company.
Which buildings do they own?
The longer you spend delving into the data the more you realise just how much of the capital — from iconic tourist spots and newbuild luxury apartments, to local high streets and corner stores — are owned via overseas tax havens. It may even go some way to explaining why so many apartment buildings have seemed to become “ghost blocks”: mostly empty, unused blocks of housing that serve as little more than housing-shaped investment assets. Centre Point, the imposing modernist high-rise by Tottenham Court Station that’s made headlines for its seemingly vacant flats, was a repeat feature in the data. At least 11 apartments in the tower block are owned by overseas investors, mostly in Hong Kong.
The kind of sums being handed over are wince-inducing. All in all, according to TPA’s data, it’s likely that hundreds of billions of pounds have been spent by overseas entities to purchase London properties. They include buildings such as the former Met police headquarters, the Olympia Exhibition Hall, and an office block and the “air above” it on Bishopsgate.
Many of the most expensive properties on the list are owned by billionaires from countries such as Hong Kong, Taiwan, Iraq, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and America. These include everyone from royals like Hazza bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the younger brother of the president of the UAE (owner of New Scotland Yard and 84 Theobalds Road), to President Trump’s self-professed friend and golf-buddy, Barry Sternlicht (owner of Milroy Walk, Rennie Court and Kings’ Reach Tower).
At £793,000,000, the most expensive price tag belongs to Arundel Great Court, the new hotel and apartment complex you’ve probably spotted being erected along the Thames, just east of Somerset House. That’s owned by Kenneth Dart, the US-born billionaire who owns the company that makes Solo Cups (the red disposable plastic cups used at frat parties, for readers unfamiliar with American teen films). An avid buyer of sovereign debt in countries such as Ecuador, Ivory Coast and Venezuela, Dart is now a citizen of beloved tax haven the Cayman Islands — though, surprisingly, the shell company he used is based in Jersey.
Other offshore owners of the capital’s costliest real estate include Ding Yumei, ex-wife of Hui Ka Ya, the disgraced chairman of collapsed Chinese property giant Evergrande and one-time richest man in China. As well as 33 flats in Nine Elms worth £49.8m, Ding owns 2–8a Rutland Gate, a 45-room property overlooking Hyde Park that can only be described as palatial. Covered in gold leaf, it features an indoor swimming pool, underground parking and several lifts, design choices which no doubt helped it set the record for the most expensive house in Britain when sold in 2020. But though it’s once again back on the market, don’t rustle for change down the back of the sofa just yet — due to a freezing order on Ding’s assets, the property is unsellable and currently abandoned.
Meet the people behind the overseas companies
So who are the biggest players, I hear you ask? Well, it’s a harder question than it seems, in part due to a long list of holes and inaccurate listings in the data, the explanation of which could take up an article in itself.
That having been said, from what we could find, among the biggest were Simon Reuben (129 properties), Thai billionaire Rit Thirakomen (120), the private office of the UAE president (84), the fittingly-named aristocrat Richard Hobart John De Courcy Moore (71) and Saudi prince Turki bin Salman Al Saud (35).
It may not be too surprising to see Reuben’s name near the top of the list, given how often he and his older brother David are regulars on the highest echelons of The Sunday Times rich list. The pair own huge swathes of the capital, from Millbank Tower, the imposing high-rise office on the banks of the Thames that currently serves as the Reform Party’s HQ, to the Primark store on Oxford Street. According to the TPA data, though, a surprising swathe of that empire, from decaying shopfronts in Mile End and high end offices on Piccadilly to Millbank Tower itself, are run via companies registered in Switzerland.
Expat cleaning billionaire James Dyson was also a repeat feature on the list. When not inventing innovative new ways to vacuum, Dyson is the landlord of a Sainsbury’s in North Cheam, offices in Clerkenwell and a lingerie shop near Oxford Street, through companies registered in Singapore and the Virgin Islands.
Other major names may be less well-known, like Israeli gambling billionaire Teddy Sagi, who has mostly avoided the limelight since slowly buying up Camden Market and much of the properties and businesses surrounding it in 2014. Since his takeover, the once-rough street market has gone through a total reinvention, becoming a polished, viral tourist destination. But those changes have left many of the market’s traders struggling to pay the rising rents. Last year, plans for a new immersive experience space with “a stage for hologram performances” were proposed to replace a section of the market where the application claimed 70% of traders were in rent arrears.
The long list of names we’ve covered in this piece are almost certainly incomplete. Many of the wealthiest individuals in the world either used different company registrations, or even just different versions of their own names, to avoid declaring their full ownership. For nearly half of the properties caught in the TPA’s data, they simply listed their asset managers in Jersey or Guernsey, or other paperless holding companies, as the ultimate owners of their property empires, or didn’t even register at all, despite the legal obligation to do so.
Take Asif Aziz. While only eight properties are directly listed in his own name, we found nearly 250 all over the capital registered at addresses in the Isle of Man linked to him, including the Kingsland Shopping Centre in Dalston, the Cineworld in Leicester Square and vape shops in Camberwell and Sutton.
And in some ways that’s the most telling detail of this data. For all the work we’ve put in and the threat of a government crackdown, it’s still only a small peek behind the curtain, a tiny and rare insight into some of the ways the capital is increasingly shaped by its wealthiest residents and investors. Real wealth, as always, prefers to whisper.
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