A SCOTTISH company linked to the millionaire son of Ukraine’s ousted leader has sidestepped new UK transparency rules designed to thwart corruption.
The business, a controversial limited partnership (SLP) of a kind dubbed “Britain’s home-grown secrecy vehicle”, was supposed to reveal its owners in August.
Its controller has already been named by credible Ukrainian news media as Oleksandr Yanukovych who, like his father ex-President Viktor Yanukovych, is currently hiding in Russia from mass corruption charges.
However, the SLP concerned has avoided naming any individual as its owner, instead declaring that it is controlled by another limited partnership, an English one, which is anonymously owned.
Viktor Yanukovych
All SLPs – but not English partnerships – have been required to name a so-called “person of significant control” or PSC since August. They face a £500 fine a day if they do not do so.
But there is nothing to stop them saying they are controlled by another anonymous entity and many have done so.
READ MORE: The clan: Ukraine, its one-time ruling family and Scottish shell firms
Campaigners for transparency are increasingly concerned that Britain’s PSC regime is easy to bypass. Researcher Richard Smith, writing in The Herald last month, described the UK corporate register, Companies House as a “glorified honesty box” which was frequently being abused
Mr Yanukovych – said to be worth half a billion dollars – was named as the defacto owner of Kellano Inter, an SLP registered at a former draper’s shop in the South Lanarkshire mining village of Douglas, as long ago as 2014.
The news wire agency Unian said the Kellano Inter – along with two equally anonymous English firms and a business from Cyprus – formally owned Mr Yanukovych’s hotel in the central Ukrainian city of Dnipro.
Oleksandr Yanukovych
Kellano Inter said its PSC was a Birmingham partnership called London and Loch Ness, whose formal partners are anonymous shell firms in tax havens. So are Kellano Inter’s.
London and Loch Ness was incorporated just three weeks before it was declared the owner of Kellano Inter, which had existed for four years.
As The Herald revealed last week the UK Government believes some 28,000 SLPs have failed to even try on paper to comply with PSC regulations.
READ MORE: The clan: Ukraine, its one-time ruling family and Scottish shell firms
The Herald’s own analysis – in a detailed study of tens of thousands of corporate filings – found the figure may be slightly lower. But the Kellano Inter case demonstrates that simply filing a PSC may not bring much transparency.
The Herald has only found around 2000 SLPs which have named a physical person as an PSC. Of these, three-quarters were in the former Soviet Union, especially Ukraine.
However, there are PSC declarations for three SLPs featured in corruption scandals in this newspaper.
The firm owned a 400,000 euro yacht registered in the British Virgin Islands but moored near Mr Naumenko’s Croatian holiday home. Ukrainian courts have already named Mr Naumenko’s partner Olena Uzlova as the owner of the SLP. She has confirmed this in a PSC.
Some 2014 protests against Viktor Yanukovych
Other Yanukovych associates with SLPs include Oleksandr Onyschenko, an MP who now lives in London having fled Ukraine after being accused of corruption.
The assets of his SLP, Rexlord Systems, were seized last year. A PSC has been filed for this firm in the name of a woman called Alla Ivanova.
Police in Odessa, Ukraine, are investigating the purchase of the office block of a derelict factory as a new mayor’s office for the city. An SLP involved in that deal, Valton Trade, has filed a PSC. It is owned by a man called Igor Kravchenko and a woman called Olena Ulyanovska, both from Odessa.
READ MORE: The clan: Ukraine, its one-time ruling family and Scottish shell firms
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