Foreign criminals are using the London housing market to launder billions of pounds, pushing up house prices for domestic buyers, a senior police officer has warned.
Donald Toon, the director of economic crime at the National Crime Agency, spoke after a spike in receipts from a tax on homes bought up by companies, trusts and investment funds rather than individuals.
Such corporations, usually based in offshore tax havens, are sometimes used by buyers keen to hide ownership of assets from their own countries’ tax authorities. The secrecy they offer can equally be used to squirrel away ill-gotten gains.
Toon told the Times: “I believe the London property market has been skewed by laundered money. Prices are being artificially driven up by overseas criminals who want to sequester their assets here in the UK.”
He spoke after provisional tax receipts showed the Treasury had made £142m from the annual tax on enveloped dwellings in just the first three months of the financial year.
The tax, introduced last year, is payable every year by companies that own a UK residential property valued above a certain amount. The City of Westminster and the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea accounted for 82% of the revenue, but inflation at the top of the market is thought to ripple down to cheaper properties as wealthy buyers are pushed down the housing chain.
Toon’s comments come amid increasing concern that billions of pounds of corruptly gained money has been laundered by criminals and foreign officials buying upmarket London properties through anonymous offshore front companies. Experts say that London, with its myriad links to tax haven crown dependencies, is arguably the global capital of money laundering.
This month a Channel 4 investigation found that estate agents in Britain’s wealthiest postcodes are willing to turn a blind eye to apparent money laundering by corrupt foreign buyers. In the documentary, titled From Russia With Cash, two undercover reporters posed as an unscrupulous Russian government official called Boris in London to purchase an upmarket property for his mistress.
The couple viewed five properties ranging in price from £3m to £15m, on the market with five estate agents in Kensington, Chelsea and Notting Hill. Despite being made aware they are dealing with apparently laundered money, the estate agents agreed to continue with a potential purchase. In several instances the estate agents recommended law firms to help a buyer hide his identity.
The agents suggested that secretive purchases of multimillion-pound houses were common in the capital. One claimed that 80% or more of his transactions were with international, overseas-based buyers and “50 or 60%” of them were conducted in “various stages of anonymity … whether it be through a company or an offshore trust”.
The NCA was set up in 2013 as a British equivalent to the FBI. Its strategic assessment of serious and organised crime identifies the UK and crown dependencies as a destination for “billions of pounds of European criminal proceeds”.
It says: “It is known that millions of pounds from the proceeds of corruption and bribery offences committed by some international politically exposed persons have been laundered through UK financial systems and property investments.”
