Pandora Papers: Blairs saved £312,000 stamp duty in property deal

This is how all the high end properties in London are traded. One does not sell a £30m mansion and have the land registry expose the owner, incur stamp duty and capital gains, or have to go through all that anti money laundering nonsense, no no no. Here's how it done:

The buyer's Jersey trust buys Belgravia First (Caymans Islands) Limited from the seller's Jersey trust with a bank wire in Switzerland. No stamp duty, no capital gains, no oversight.

Belgravia First Caymans owns Whitestone Properties (British Virgin Islands), which in turn owns the property as registered publicly at the land registry.

The Whitestone BVI company then immediately signs a lease on a napkin to UK registered Conch Property Management Limited, a shell with a registered office and directors at a London law firm.

Conch is fully owned by another offshore trust. The UK Conch company registers with the council and utilities as the tenant, liable for the council tax, water, etc. The solicitors handle the rest, such that the council and utilities have no cause to write to the carribean or Jersey, pry further, or God forbid, add the true resident to the electoral roll or credit reference agencies.

Even if anyone does pry further, all they see is that Number 1 Belgravia Square is owned by Whitestone BVI, and has been for the last 30 years. No data is made available for the owners of Whitestone by the BVI companies house. As for the tenant, this is a London law firm shell, owned by a private trust in Jersey with anonymous controllers. And they don't even own the property, they simply manage it for Whitestone BVI, who themselves have an anonymous parent company, and no banking activities. Whitestone have nothing to do with the Swiss wire and company transfer, which was all done by it's parent, in another jurisdiction, Belgravia Caymans.

Taxes and tracibilty are for the little people, darling.

/r/unitedkingdom Thread Link - bbc.com