One Hyde Park: a slice of the British Virgin Islands in central London
Most of block's hyper-luxury flats, costing from £3m to £136m, have been sold to offshore entities – most registered in BVI
•Interactive: owners registered in the British Virgin Islands
- The Guardian, Monday 26 November 2012 21.02 GMT
One Hyde Park, where at least 30 of the 72 apartments are owned by BVI-registered entities. Photograph: Graham Turner for the Guardian
A single block of flats in central London presents the most blatant case of British Virgin Islands secrecy in Britain. The four towers of One Hyde Park, designed by the architect Lord Rogers and backed by the Qatari ruling family, are aimed at what some would call the obscenely rich.
Almost 80% of the 72 hyper-luxury apartments have been bought, at prices ranging from £3m to £136m, in the name of anonymous offshore entities – the majority of them registered in the BVI.
A possible explanation for offshore secrecy in one case emerged this year, when the alleged true owner of a £3.6m flat, the bankrupt Irishproperty developer Ray Grehan, was identified and accused of an attempt to cheat his creditors.
The Irish "bad bank", Nama, is owed €269m (£216m) by Grehan and is pursuing him though the courts. Grehan denies wrongdoing: he maintains the flat is not really his, but belongs to a family trust.
Nama has secured a freeze on any sale. According to the court hearings, it alleges the Irish property tycoon deliberately transferred his original interest into an offshore company, Postlake Ltd, registered in the Isle of Man. Postlake in turn was owned by Purcey Ltd, an entity registered in the BVI, on behalf of a Manx trust set up by Grehan. The trust beneficiaries, it is claimed, turned out to be Grehan and his family.
Also now identified, although not accused of such wrongdoing, is the owner of the most extravagant of the flats at One Hyde Park. The BVI-registered company Water Property Holdings Ltd paid £136m in 2007 for a pair of penthouse flats to be knocked together. Behind the anonymous entity is Rinat Akhmetov (pictured), the richest man in post-Soviet Ukraine.
But this still leaves a further 30 or so BVI owners who are allowed by the Land Registry to hide their names, along with others registered in even more controversial secrecy jurisdictions, such as Liechtenstein, St Vincent and Liberia.
Such techniques will enable the residents of a total of £760m worth of property to avoid British capital gains and inheritance tax.
Some of those whose origins lie abroad will also be able to avoid the attention of their own tax authorities, and of local citizens who might wonder where such wealth came from.
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Government demands for user data worldwide from Google have "increased steadily," the search giant says in a new report: "One trend has become clear: Government surveillance is on the rise."
"Government demands for user data have increased steadily since we first launched the Transparency Report," writes Dorothy Chou, Google senior policy analyst, on the company's blog about its latest "transparency report."
"In the first half of 2012, there were 20,938 inquiries from government entities around the world. Those requests were for information about 34,614 accounts."
The finding comes in the wake of revelations of government email snooping in the case of former CIA director David Petraeus and Paula Broadwell.
U.S. government agencies continue to make the most requests for user data, Google says: 7,969 such requests in the first half of the year. Google says it complied with 90 percent of those requests.
Google
Google user data requests from governments around the world, January to June 2012, ranked in order by percentage of the requests complied with.
Second to the U.S. in the number of government requests for user data: India, with 2,319 requests; then, Brazil (1,566), France (1,546), Germany (1,533) and the United Kingdom (1,425):
Google
Countries listed in order of number of requests for user data from Google, from January to June 2012.
Here's Google's look at the number of government requests worldwide to turn over data it has received from 2009, when it started sharing the transparency data, to now:
Google
Global requests from governments asking Google to turn over user data, from 2009 to 2012.
"You can see the country-by-country trends for requests to hand over user data and to remove content from our services in the Transparency Report itself, but in aggregate around the world, the numbers continue to go up," Chou wrote.
An important note to all of this, Chou adds: The information shared in the report represents "only an isolated sliver showing how governments interact with the Internet, since for the most part we don’t know what requests are made of other technology or telecommunications companies."
Google, she says, is "heartened that in the past year, more companies like Dropbox, LinkedIn, Sonic.net andTwitter have begun to share their statistics too. Our hope is that over time, more data will bolster public debate about how we can best keep the Internet free and open."