JOKERS are taking advantage of British’s lax corporate registration system to create companies with obscene names or with dead foreign despots as directors.
Firms called Hugh Janis, Fart, Jobby and Bol Lox Limited have been incorporated in recent years as the UK opened up its Companies House to electronic filings with only cursory checks.
Many of the names are unprintable, but we can report that a Mr XXX Stalin is the sole director of a restaurant business and Messer Mubarak, Gaddafi and Bin Laden used to run a “cheap funeral directors”.
Campaigners argue the joke companies underline just how fast Britain’s corporate register is growing. The number of firms at Companies House grew more than a third from 2010 to 2016 and now totals some 3.8 million.
The Herald earlier this month revealed that just six members of staff are employed to ensure the accuracy of the information on file at Companies House after a series of questions from an MP, the SNP’s Roger Mullin.
Writing in today’s Herald, corporate transparency campaigner and writer Richard Smith cited a 2008 report from a firm called Datanomic which found 4,000 exact matches for high-risk persons as British company directors.
He said: “High-risk persons are, for instance, money launderers, terrorists, and potentially corrupt international dignitaries, or Politically Exposed Persons as the polite circumlocution has it.”
Companies House argues that it is far more transparent than many similar organisations around the world.
A spokeswoman said: “Companies House has amongst the highest rates of compliance with company filing requirements in the world. We follow up on all complaints and in the vast majority of cases, where there appears to be a breach, companies correct their information straight away.”
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