{"id":10036,"date":"2018-01-19T11:00:43","date_gmt":"2018-01-19T11:00:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.buyassociation.co.uk\/?p=10036"},"modified":"2018-01-19T11:00:43","modified_gmt":"2018-01-19T11:00:43","slug":"foreign-investors-buying-uk-property-identified-register","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.buyassociationgroup.com\/en-us\/news\/foreign-investors-buying-uk-property-identified-register\/","title":{"rendered":"Foreign investors buying UK property to be identified in world’s first register"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last year’s Paradise Papers leak revealed the secret, offshore ownership and investments of the powerful and wealthy, and Theresa May has since come under more pressure to create a public register to increase transparency and combat corruption.<\/strong><\/p>\n

This week in the House of Lords, the prime minister agreed to set out a timetable for revealing the foreign ownership<\/a> of British property, after coming under pressure from peers Lord Faulks and Lord Hodgson.<\/p>\n

The deadline for revealing the information has now been set at early 2021 after Faulks and Hodgson proposed an amendment to the Sanctions and Anti-Money Laundering Bill.<\/a>\u00a0The amendment addresses the prevention of investment into the UK from companies whose proceeds have been gained by crime and corruption.<\/p>\n

Since 2004, \u00a3180m worth of UK property has been investigated as the suspected proceeds of corruption, over three quarters of which are known to use offshore corporate secrecy – which could indicate the use of high-level money laundering<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Rachel Davies Teka, head of advocacy at Transparency International UK, said: “The longer we have to wait for this register, the longer corrupt individuals will be able to use the UK property market to hide their wealth.”<\/p>\n

Expose the murky companies<\/h4>\n

Anti-corruption tsar John Penrose said: “More than \u00a3122bn of property in England and Wales is owned by offshore firms<\/a>. If they\u2019re clean and reputable, fine, they\u2019ll have nothing to fear. But if murky shell companies have bought British property with plundered or laundered cash, we don\u2019t want them here.”<\/p>\n

The government had previously agreed that such corruption was a risk to the UK’s international reputation and allowing it to continue ran the risk of helping to keep property prices artificially high<\/a>. However, no action had yet been taken, which is why the peers had pushed for a timetable to be set by the prime minister.<\/p>\n

Faulks said: “I suppose you want to encourage foreign investment but not this sort. A way to reduce or stamp it out is a register where companies have to declare beneficial owners<\/a>.” The creation of the register would leave the market more open to legitimate investors.<\/p>\n

Business secretary Greg Clark said: “We are committed to protecting the integrity and reputation of our property market to ensure the UK is seen as an attractive business environment \u2013 a key part of our Industrial Strategy.<\/p>\n

“This world-first register will build on our reputation for corporate transparency as well as helping to create a hostile environment for economic crimes like money laundering.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last year’s Paradise Papers leak revealed the secret, offshore ownership and investments of the powerful and wealthy, and Theresa May has since come under more pressure to create a public register to increase transparency and combat corruption. This week in the House of Lords, the prime minister agreed to set out a timetable for revealing… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1069,"featured_media":10043,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[141,6],"tags":[67,341],"class_list":["post-10036","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-overseas-property","category-uk-housing-market","tag-foreign-investment","tag-newsletter"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.buyassociationgroup.com\/en-us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10036","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.buyassociationgroup.com\/en-us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.buyassociationgroup.com\/en-us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.buyassociationgroup.com\/en-us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1069"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.buyassociationgroup.com\/en-us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10036"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.buyassociationgroup.com\/en-us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10036\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.buyassociationgroup.com\/en-us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10043"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.buyassociationgroup.com\/en-us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10036"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.buyassociationgroup.com\/en-us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10036"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.buyassociationgroup.com\/en-us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10036"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}