Pandora Papers reveal 1,500 UK properties secretly owned by tycoons, politicians

The stunning leak of Pandora Papers has uncovered the secret owners of over 1,500 properties in the UK, bought using foreign companies. The details featured in the leak of offshore financial documents list the property with an estimated value in excess of £4 billion. As per the BBC report, the secret owners of British properties include high-profile foreign politicians, other people accused of corruption and the UK’s political donors. 

Reportedly, British lawmakers have said that they will be bringing a new law during their parliamentary time and successive governments have even pledged to introduce the legislation that would make it compulsory to name the ones owning property through foreign firms in a bid to rule out money laundering. Pandora Papers uncovered the tycoons and politicians who owned properties in Britain via at least 716 offshore companies. 

The Pandora Papers is the dossier of over 11.9 million confidential files which were published by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) on October 3. It has drawn attention to the alleged shadow financial schemes and other offshore activities of hundreds of political figures from across the world. While owning real estate through an offshore firm is legal as there is no indication of wrongdoing in using a foreign company to own property, the UK government only recently updated its assessment of money laundry risk in the property market from “medium” to “high.”

Names mentioned in Pandora Papers

The Pandora Papers include the wife of retail magnate Philip Green who reportedly went on a buying spree of property in London. The Qatari ruling family bought two of London’s most expensive homes through foreign firms and saved millions of pounds of tax. Additionally, Ukrainian billionaire Gennadiy Bogolyubov, who is already under investigation by the FBI and had millions in frozen assets in a fraud case, is known to have over £400 million of UK property. A £40 million London office block is also owned by the son of sanctioned oligarch of Russia, Mikhail Gutseriev. 

BBC, The Guardian and Finance Uncovered along with other media outlets worked with ICIJ to identify the leaked files as well as the individual who used overseas companies to own property in England and Wales. Moreover, Jordan’s monarch, King Abdullah II has secretly purchased at least 14 luxury homes that worth over $106 million in the US and the UK. ICIJ stated, “The advisers helped him set up at least 36 shell companies from 1995 to 2017.”

Other names in Pandora Papers include Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babis, who as per ICIJ, “injected $22 million into a string of shell companies to buy a sprawling property, known as Chateau Bigaud, in a hilltop village in Mougins, France, near Cannes.” Even former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair and his wife Cherie “came the owners of an $8.8 million Victorian building by acquiring the British Virgin Islands company that held the property” in 2017.

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