Criminal fears as Rangers, Celtic and Man U brands hijacked

With more than seven ‘Rangers’ football clubs headquartered at different addresses throughout Scotland – including one at a council estate in Falkirk ­– the scale of the abuse stretches beyond the absurd.

One firm – called Glasgow Celtic Football Club Ltd ­– was based at a terrace home in Dundee, while a Manchester United FC Limited still operates from a business centre in London suburbs.

Companies House - dubbed a "glorified honesty box abused by the dishonest" by one anti-corruption campaigner - has also accepted filings for multiple other companies using the Old Firm names, as well as English clubs such as Tottenham Hotspur, Everton and Derby County.

READ MORE: There are so many Rangers firms they could form a league

There is also a mock ScotRail and Railtrack headquartered at a flat in Edinburgh renamed "ScotRail House" despite having nothing go do with Scotland's national train operator.

Graham Barrow, a financial crime expert who advises major global banks, stressed football club corporate clones, while most likely created by fans as a joke, were not a laughing matter.

He said: "It may be a silly thing but it is a silly thing with serious undertones. When we make it easy for anyone to clone any company name we make it easy for criminals to do the same."

The new revelations come after The Herald last year revealed that a single mystery 'tycoon' had registered 96 companies with the names of some of the world's biggest brands in alcohol, retailing and tobacco.

Tofikuddin Ovaysi - the self-styled "baron of spirits" - was able to convince an entire Ukrainian city he was a millionaire investor who owned much of Scotch whisky industry before fleeing in debt.

The 'baron of spirits', via Ternopillive.com

Industry giants - including the owners of brands like Glenfiddich - challenged Ovaysi, many of whose companies have been renamed and all of which have now been dissolved. But the process of shutting down his clones took months.

READ MORE: There are so many Rangers firms they could form a league

It is impossible to register a name identical to an existing company. So clones - whose owners can pay as little as £10 for their own firm - have to have subtle differences from the originals.

Glasgow MP Alison Thewliss has been campaigning for reforms of Companies House as part of a crackdown on dummy corporations and shell firms used for fraud, money-laundering.

She said: “Like so many issues with company registration in the UK, and abuse of financial vehicles such as limited partnerships, the problem lies with a lack of enforcement.

“The UK Government has been told countless times that Companies House is chronically understaffed. There are millions of firms registered in the UK, and only a handful of staff employed to carry out validation checks to ensure business activities are legitimate.

“Company cloning is clearly continuing unabated, and in some cases, duplicate businesses are allowed to operate for years at a time.

"To suggest that the responsibility for reporting should sit solely with those companies being targeted is, I believe, a dereliction of duty on the part of the UK government.

“Until such time as Companies House is adequately resourced, we can expect that company cloning – and other disreputable goings-on – will continue. Indeed, the longer the government ignores this issue, the more damage will ultimately be done to the UK’s reputation as a good place to do business”

Alion Thewliss

READ MORE: There are so many Rangers firms they could form a league

A spokesman for Companies House said: "We will not accept a company name on incorporation if the same name is already on the register.

"Complaints are followed up if company information is incorrect or incomplete and where potentially criminal activities are suspected, "Companies House works closely with law enforcement bodies."

Companies House has 4 million firms on its books. Ms Thewliss and others have argued that the registry does not do enough - or have enough resources - to police its own data.

READ MORE: The White House, HQ of the USA and ScotRail

The Herald last year revealed how easy to was for jokers to register 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.

Directors included 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”.

An Italian businessman linked with organised crime was able to insert his occupation as fraudster - in Italian - on the Companies House website.

Earlier this year the campaign group Global Witness revealed that some 4000 babies and toddlers under two had been named as the beneficial owners of British companies. One owner, the international body found in a major work of research, was still to be born.

Nonsense or cloned names or fake or anonymous directors or owners make it harder to ensure corporate transparency, campaigners warn. 

Global Witness, in its report earier this year, said: "For many years, we’ve been campaigning for information on company beneficial owners to be made publicly available in a bid to tackle the problem of corruption and anonymous companies.

It added: "As calls for such information grew, sceptics doubted whether anyone would use this data and if they did, whether it would be able to reveal anything new and important.

"Our work has shown these registers can be effective in identifying wrongdoing, but in order for this to happen, the registers need to capture the right kind of data and in a format that is most conducive to being used, i.e. open data."