Près de 52,000 proprietés are encore détenues de façon anonymous au Royaume-Uni, certaines par “des kleptocrates et des oligarchs”, malgré l’entrée en vigueur de règles les obligeant à dévoiler leur identité, a dénoncé mardi l’ONG Transparency International dans un relationship.
The organization has identified ‘more than £6.7 billion worth of UK property bought with suspicious funds’, most of which was held by opaque offshore companies, particularly luxury properties in uptown London.
a broken law
More than 20% of this sum comes from Russia, in particular for the benefit of people “subject to sanctions and close to the Kremlin”, says the NGO, which also cites the former Angolan vice president Manuel Domingos Vicente or the Azerbaijani ruling couple Ilham Aliyev and Mehriban Alieva. .
London, regularly accused of doing too little about dubious money flowing into the country, had toughened its tone following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, including passing a law to force property owners to develop. But “almost half of the companies required to declare their owner did not do so” before the deadline of January 31, denounces Transparency International.
Some, for example, said that the owner was another company “although this is against the rules in many cases”, others said that they were held through trusts, “opaque structures”, and others simply stated that they did not have a beneficiary. real, deplores the organization.
“Transparency about who the real owners are in the UK is key to solving the problem of (the country’s) role as a global hub for dirty money,” Duncan Hames, an official at Transparency International, said in a press release.
Source: BFM TV
