There is a story you may have missed. I certainly did. It came out, in Britain at least, on Hogmanay. It was about an Italian politician accused of taking bribes to quash a report at the Council of Europe about human rights abuses in the oil-rich former Soviet republic of Azerbaijan.

The politician, a Conservative called Luca Volontè, admits taking money for "advice" from five firms linked to an Azerbaijani businessman but denies bribery.

Payments, say investigators, included nearly 2m euros from two firms based at a mail drop in West George Street, Glasgow. One was Hilux Services, now renamed SL012732. The other was Polux Management.

This story comes courtesy of The Observer and, originally, Italian journalists. They did not focus hugely on the Scottish firms. I think we should. Because, like so many other British shell companies caught up in foreign corruption scandals, they are Scottish limited partnerships or SLPs.

Here at The Herald we have written scores of stories about such SLPs, firms which have legal personality to open bank accounts or own assets but whose owners need pay no tax, file no accounts or reveal their identities.

This is a form off business that has proven astonishingly popular among international criminals, especially those of the former Soviet Union, after being intensively marketed around the world as a vehicle for secrecy and tax avoidance. We should be asking ourselves why.

The UK Government agrees. The British Security Minister has described our reports on SLPs- and his own law-enforcement briefings - as "very concerning". Last week Whitehall announced an evidence-gathering exercise on how to detoxify SLPs - and related English and Northern Irish partnerships (which lack the legal personality of their Scottish cousins). This was welcomed by every political party in Scotland, Oxfam and tax transparency groups.

It did not go down quite so well among certain Edinburgh law firms. Alan Soppitt, a partner at Burness Paull, told The Times a crackdown could drive legitimate business away, especially private investment funds.

Mr Soppitt, who has previously failed to respond to requests to speak to this newspaper, said: "Any unnecessary restriction on [SLP's] ease of use could benefit other funds centres." Many of you will disapprove of the kind of tax-efficient offshore vehicles Mr Soppitt designs. Others will regard them as useful tools for an open economy. But they are not the criminal enterprises The Herald has sought to expose.

How many SLPs are of the kind lawyers make for funds investors? Not many. My colleague Richard Smith has crunched numbers for new SLPs opened in 2016. He found 5,215. Of these, only 261 are registered at the addresses of Scottish law firms with funds businesses, most at Burness Paull. But 93.5 per cent gave addresses at virtual offices, such as the one in West George Street where Hilux and Polux are based. There is no way of knowing who the real owners of these firms are: they are shell companies in traditional tax havens like Belize or Panama.

The UK Government is seeking views on some modest proposals for SLPs, such as revealing who their owners are, expecting them to have a real life representative in the UK or filing some kind of accounts. Is this really something respectable private funds would have to fear? Surely not.