London Daily

Focus on the big picture.
Friday, Oct 10, 2025

Boris Johnson promises UK property register to expose kleptocrat money

Boris Johnson promises UK property register to expose kleptocrat money

Plans first announced under David Cameron would strip secrecy from offshore ownership including by senior Russian figures

As the government acts to squeeze Russian oligarchs in the wake of Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, Boris Johnson has promised to rush forward plans for a new public register, revealing the ultimate owners of properties across the UK.

The government had previously failed to act, despite the vast offshore leak known as the Pandora Papers revealing last year the details of 1,500 UK properties owned through secretive offshore companies, some of them connected to senior Russian figures.

The data showed that the family of Russian oligarch Mikhail Gutseriev – who was placed under sanctions by the UK, EU and US last year – owned more than £50m of property in the City and West End of London (though representatives of his family insisted he had no interest in the assets).

In total, it has been estimated that £170bn-worth of UK property is held overseas, much of it anonymously: whether to avoid publicity, tax, or worse. Many of these anonymously held properties are concentrated in London – in particular in Westminster and Kensington.

Making their ultimate owners public is aimed at helping law enforcement agencies track what Johnson called “dirty money” – but will also increase transparency for civil society groups and journalists.

The new register will apply retrospectively to property bought up to 20 years ago in England and Wales, and from 2014 in Scotland. Entities that do not declare the beneficial owner will face restrictions on selling the property, and people who break the rules could face up to five years in prison.

It is far from a new idea: the UK has had a publicly available register of beneficial ownership for companies – the People with Significant Control register – since 2016.

The same approach is gradually being extended to British overseas territories, after intensive campaigning by a cross-party alliance of backbenchers, including the Conservative former development secretary Andrew Mitchell and former Labour minister Margaret Hodge.

The long-awaited property register is unfinished business from a crackdown begun almost a decade ago.

When the UK chaired the G8 in 2013, David Cameron told the global elite at Davos, the annual Swiss shindig for business leaders and politicians, that governments should be “shining a light on company ownership, land ownership and where money flows from and to”.

He talked about wanting to tackle the “travelling caravan of lawyers, accountants and financial gurus” who support the hiding of vast sums of wealth.

Three years later, in 2016, Cameron hosted an anti-corruption summit in London, at which he announced his intention of introducing a property register.

“The new register for foreign companies will mean corrupt individuals and countries will no longer be able to move, launder and hide illicit funds through London’s property market, and will not benefit from our public funds,” a government press release said at the time.

At the time Cameron was being questioned on if there was a conflict of interest between his policy to crack down on aggressive tax avoidance and a Panama-based investment trust his father had set up which did not have to pay UK tax on its profits. Cameron had once owned shares in the trust but had sold them in 2010 because he said he “didn’t want anyone to say you have other agendas or vested interests”.

Since then, however, successive administrations have dragged their feet, and the measure has never been enacted – despite Theresa May’s government getting as far as including it in a draft bill in 2018.

Robert Barrington, professor of anti-corruption practice at the University of Sussex, says there are two possible explanations. “One is that the government have not accorded it the priority, because of Brexit and so on. The other is that it has been blocked, because of interests.”

Over the six years since the plan was first mooted, he says he has increasingly come around to the second of these. “I don’t know whether it’s the Treasury, the City, oligarchs making donations to political parties; but there is a block in the system.”

Whatever internal opposition there may have been, however, appears to have been abruptly swept away by Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, and the resulting desire, as Johnson put it last week, to “squeeze Russia from the global economy, piece by piece”.

Newsletter

Related Articles

0:00
0:00
Close
California County Reinstates Mask Mandate in Health Facilities as Respiratory Illness Risk Rises
Israel and Hamas Agree to First Phase of Trump-Brokered Gaza Truce, Hostages to Be Freed
French Political Turmoil Elevates Marine Le Pen as Rassemblement National Poised for Power
China Unveils Sweeping Rare Earth Export Controls to Shield ‘National Security’
The Davos Set in Decline: Why the World Economic Forum’s Power Must Be Challenged
France: Less Than a Month After His Appointment, the New French Prime Minister Resigns
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán stated that Hungary will not adopt the euro because the European Union is falling apart.
Sarah Mullally Becomes First Woman Appointed Archbishop of Canterbury
Mayor in western Germany in intensive care after stabbing
Australian government pays Deloitte nearly half a million dollars for a report built on fabricated quotes, fake citations, and AI-generated nonsense.
US Prosecutors Gained Legal Approval to Hack Telegram Servers
Macron Faces Intensifying Pressure to Resign or Trigger New Elections Amid France’s Political Turmoil
Standard Chartered Names Roberto Hoornweg as Sole Head of Corporate & Investment Banking
UK Asylum Housing Firm Faces Backlash Over £187 Million Profits and Poor Living Conditions
UK Police Crack Major Gang in Smuggling of up to 40,000 Stolen Phones to China
BYD’s UK Sales Soar Nearly Nine-Fold, Making Britain Its Biggest Market Outside China
Trump Proposes Farm Bailout from Tariff Revenues Amid Backlash from Other Industries
FIFA Accuses Malaysia of Forging Citizenship Documents, Suspends Seven Footballers
Latvia to Bar Tourist and Occasional Buses to Russia and Belarus Until 2026
A Dollar Coin Featuring Trump’s Portrait Expected to Be Issued Next Year
Australia Orders X to Block Murder Videos, Citing Online Safety and Public Exposure
Three Scientists Awarded Nobel Prize in Medicine for Discovery of Immune Self-Tolerance Mechanism
OpenAI and AMD Forge Landmark AI-Chip Alliance with Equity Option
Munich Airport Reopens After Second Drone Shutdown
France Names New Government Amid Political Crisis
Trump Stands Firm in Shutdown Showdown and Declares War on Drug Cartels — Turning Crisis into Opportunity
Surge of U.S. Billionaires Transforms London’s Peninsula Apartments into Ultra-Luxury Stronghold
Pro Europe and Anti-War Babiš Poised to Return to Power After Czech Parliamentary Vote
Jeff Bezos Calls AI Surge a ‘Good’ Bubble, Urges Focus on Lasting Innovation
Japan’s Ruling Party Chooses Sanae Takaichi, Clearing Path to First Female Prime Minister
Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs Sentenced to Fifty Months in Prison Following Prostitution Conviction
Taylor Swift’s ‘Showgirl’ Launch Extends Billion-Dollar Empire
Trump Administration Launches “TrumpRx” Plan to Enable Direct Drug Sales at Deep Discounts
Trump Announces Intention to Impose 100 Percent Tariff on Foreign-Made Films
Altman Says GPT-5 Already Outpaces Him, Warns AI Could Automate 40% of Work
Singapore and Hong Kong Vie to Dominate Asia’s Rising Gold Trade
Trump Organization Teams with Saudi Developer on $1 Billion Trump Plaza in Jeddah
Manhattan Sees Surge in Office-to-Housing Conversions, Highest Since 2008
Switzerland and U.S. Issue Joint Assurance Against Currency Manipulation
Electronic Arts to Be Taken Private in Historic $55 Billion Buyout
Thomas Jacob Sanford Named as Suspect in Deadly Michigan Church Shooting and Arson
Russian Research Vessel 'Yantar' Tracked Mapping Europe’s Subsea Cables, Raising Security Alarms
New York Man Arrested After On-Air Confession to 2017 Parents’ Murders
U.S. Defense Chief Orders Sudden Summit of Hundreds of Generals and Admirals
Global Cruise Industry Posts Dramatic Comeback with 34.6 Million Passengers in 2024
Trump Claims FBI Planted 274 Agents at Capitol Riot, Citing Unverified Reports
India: Internet Suspended in Bareilly Amid Communal Clashes Between Muslims and Hindus
Supreme Court Extends Freeze on Nearly $5 Billion in U.S. Foreign Aid at Trump’s Request
Archaeologists Recover Statues and Temples from 2,000-Year-Old Sunken City off Alexandria
China Deploys 2,000 Workers to Spain to Build Major EV Battery Factory, Raising European Dependence
×