Mr Gutseriev is the founder of Safmar Group, a Russian conglomerate with interests in oil, coal, property and retail.įollowing the crackdown on human rights and democracy in Belarus in 2020, the UK and EU have recently brought in sanctions against President Lukashenko, along with Mr Gutseriev and other close associates.
Ministers say they will bring in a new law to tackle these issues when they have parliamentary time. Successive Conservative governments have pledged to introduce legislation making it compulsory to name those owning property via foreign companies in a bid to stamp out money-laundering. Mr Sunak also told Sky News that HMRC (HM Revenue & Customs) would look through the documents "to see if there is anything we can learn". The prime minister has said all party donations are “vetted in the normal way in accordance with rules set up by the Labour government, so we vet them the whole time”.Ĭhancellor Rishi Sunak told the BBC the UK leads the world in "improving transparency - making sure we know who owns things" and "exchanging data between tax authorities or enforcement bodies". We reported on Monday that the documents revealed a prominent Tory donor who contributed to Boris Johnson's leadership campaign was involved in one of Europe's biggest corruption scandals.Īnd the Conservative Party faced fresh questions about donations made by the wife of a former Russian minister, Lubov Chernukhin. This is the third day of revelations from the Pandora Papers. But it is still waiting to be introduced to Parliament.īBC Copyright: BBC Chancellor Rishi Sunak has been asked about the Pandora Papers Image caption: Chancellor Rishi Sunak has been asked about the Pandora Papers The 2019 Queen’s Speech included a commitment to progress with the legislation. Last year a ministerial statement said the new law would make it clear that “the UK property market is not a safe haven for dirty money”. It would require the name of the ultimate owner to be registered, rather than just the immediate owner. The government published draft legislation in 2018 that would change the rules. This means there is no way to see who runs the secret company abroad. So if you want to hide your name, you can list the owner as a company instead, which is set up in a country with high levels of secrecy. Under current rules, only the immediate owner of a property has to be declared. Successive UK governments have committed to end the secrecy over who owns properties in the country. The documents reveal the secret owners of more than 1,500 UK properties bought using offshore firms. One of the biggest revelations in the Pandora Papers leak is how prominent and wealthy people have been legally setting up companies to secretly buy property in the UK. Unlike other revelations to come out of this leak exposing the super rich’s secretive methods of buying up swathes of property in London’s fanciest neighbourhoods, Ata Ahsani’s Unaoil earnings were put into a fund used to invest in commercial property including a cinema complex in Sunderland and a business park just outside Hull.Īta Ahsani’s lawyers said he has not been convicted of anything and there is no evidence that all of the money generated by Unaoil was the proceeds of crime. The money from Ata Ahsani, the British Iranian founder of Unaoil, was paid into large funds used to invest in UK property. We can reveal that money from a corrupt company at the centre of a global bribery scandal has been invested into the UK High Street.ĭocuments from the leak reveal how £7.5 million in earnings from Unaoil - a business which paid bribes to secure oil and gas contracts – was funneled offshore. A fresh revelation from our investigation of the Pandora Papers now.
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