Translated material
Real estate flight
In June 2015, Transparency International is going to publish a new report prepared in different countries of the world about what methods are laundered by corruption money.
One of the most successful ways is the purchase of real estate. In the UK, this is literally visible with the naked eye. 21 % of the most expensive London real estate in 2014 was bought by Russians, and this is the data of only one large London agency 
The purchase was spontaneous: a relative received a small apartment in a new building as a gift from her foreign grandparents, and a friend with her husband from Moscow took photographs of this housing on the Internet. And then we followed the link to ask: how much apartments are in this new building? And they realized that they could well afford. They are not oligarchs, but non -poor people, and their savings were good. We chose a apartment with two bedrooms, about 60–65 m2, and bought it right on the Internet, transferring money. As they say in Britain, the buyer for cash - that is, without a mortgage.
Five years have passed since then. Now their London apartment, in which they are rare, is estimated by realtors twice as much as it was when buying, and the price continues to grow. If one day they decide to sell real estate, it is very likely that their net “earnings” after paying taxes will be £ 100-130 thousand for each year of property ownership. This, of course, provided that the trends will not change in the London housing market - but this is what experts predict.
Savills real estate guaranteed income , which specializes in working with expensive British housing, in February of this year estimated the total cost of the country's housing stock at £ 5.75 trillion - this is the total GDP of the three largest economies of the European Union - Germany, Italy and France. A quarter of this amount is the cost of housing in London, where the price of real estate, especially in prestigious areas, is growing ahead of pace compared to the rest of the country. Foreign investors are attracted by political and economic stability, the development of financial markets and services, and the possibility of increasing capital, which no banking rate can be compared. Unlike investments in securities or other financial instruments, when buying London real estate, there are much less risks, and the income is almost guaranteed high. The fact that Moscow acquaintances discovered almost accidentally for themselves, for serious foreign investors, is a long -beaten road.
Large washing but not only investors. Transparency International has recently published a report that analyzes British real estate, especially the most expensive that is used to launder capital obtained as a result of corruption and other violations of financial legislation in different countries. “Buying this kind of real estate allows corruptions to wash a significant amount of stolen money at the expense of one purchase. A large amount of money can be “packed” in expensive property, and later reinvested with an extremely insignificant risk of capital loss, ”the report says.
The report quotes Savills from 2013: 90 % of housing in expensive London new buildings (price 1 m2 above £ 4000 - approximately 341 thousand rubles at today's rate) is bought by foreigners. Most often in this market you can meet immigrants from Eastern Europe and Russia, followed by representatives of the Middle East, North African countries and China.
London, house No. 1 of such an address - without a street and a postal index - since the beginning of the 19th century, has been assigned to the house in which the Duke of Arthur Wellington lived, which defeated Napoleon’s troops under Waterloo. However, since 2011, the title “House number one” was informally to another building located nearby-to the 86-apartment new building at the “Hyde Park, House One”. These are the most expensive London apartments, which were sold at a price of up to £ 140 million apiece. By January 2013, 76 apartments in this building were sold, but only 12 buyers turned out to be “warm -blooded people”, as the American magazine Vanity Fair, which conducted a multi -month investigation, was elegantly expressed. The remaining 64 apartments were owned by companies, three of which were registered in London, one in California, one in Thailand and 59 in offshore. Among the buyers of apartments in this house were a Russian entrepreneur, co -owner of Capital Group Vladistav Doronin, until recently, one of the richest people in Ukraine Rinat Akhmetov, chairman of the board of directors of the public company Kazakhstan Vladimir Kim, Kazakh singer Anar Aitzhanova. In this house, the entire mail is transmitted by the X -ray apparatus, the windows can withstand the bomb explosion, the elevator recognition system for the retina is installed in the elevators, and residents can order service from the five -star hotel located nearby, which is reported with the house on the tunnel.
The ends in the water are nothing easier than hiding the name of the real beneficiary of property in the modern economy. It is enough to google - and the inquisitive researcher will open how simply and quickly you can open the company in the offshore zone, where other laws are acted than in developed countries, and it is not necessary to disclose information about beneficiaries. Obtaining in the hands of a finished company with the stand -up director and shareholder who will not have ideas about the true activity of the company and intervene in the affairs of its beneficiary, occupies from two days and costs from $ 1,500–2000. An additional bonus is that real estate owned by the offshore company is exempted from taxes, but the main thing for which this is done is secrecy.
“Last year, the British government proposed voluntarily paying taxes to those who bought real estate through offshore companies - and it was amazed that there were five times more people who wanted to. People are ready to pay, but to keep their names secret, ”said Nt Nick Maxwell, head of the Transparency International UK research group, which prepared the“ corruption on the threshold of your home ”report.
The report says that about 41 thousand objects of London real estate are registered for foreigners - or approximately 1.3 % of the total. At the same time, out of all property registered with foreign owners, about 90 % belongs to offshore companies.
The frame from the BBC documentary “Russian rich London” (Russian, Rich and Living in London) is the big difference on the website of any British real estate agency, each announcement of the sale will be a standard post: a mandatory check on the 2007 legislation is carried out to counteract money laundering. This means that an agent for the sale of real estate should verify the legality of the origin of the capital owner. However, this is very difficult to do with some foreign owners - say, when the money comes from Russia, or from the countries of the Middle East, or Africa. And it is almost impossible - if the owner is an offshore company. Only the name of the owner is entered into a single database where all British real estate is recorded, but not the beneficiary, who remains hidden. In addition, offshore companies often hide the real price of a real estate transaction. It happens that all investigations stop at this point. And, finally, the agent needs to check the origin of the capital only his client - that is, a real estate seller. On the side of the buyer in Britain, agents do not perform.
The large real estate agency - Knight Frank - in November 2014 issued a report that states that 21 % of the most expensive London real estate, which it sold in the previous six months, was bought by the Russians. This, of course, was a special time when, after joining the Crimea to Russia, the beginning of the war in the east of Ukraine, the tragedy with Boeing and sanctions/antisanctions began pitching in financial and foreign exchange markets, and wealthy Russians rushed to save their money. The article in the Daily Mail newspaper, telling about the Knight Frank study, was called frighteningly: "Superbowed Russians buy one of the five objects of London real estate at a price of £ 10 million, but the Chinese quickly catch up with them." Knight Frank did not accidentally open special departments for working with Russians, Chinese and countries of South Asia (the site specifies that, first of all, we are talking about immigrants from India, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Sri Lanka), in whose staff they gained speakers of the languages of these countries.
But the real Russian rich, especially those who want to keep their names secret, are, of course, not through network agencies. At the beginning of this year, the BBC showed a documentary about the life of the rich Russians in Londongrad, as it was called. It was in this film and an interview with real estate agents who work with real estate category "Lux".
“Rich Russians desperately want to take their money out of the country,” says Gary Hasham, managing director of the Boutique Agency of Beauchamp Estates. “The growth of Russian clients who addresses us amounted to 10 %.”
And he adds: “I still have half a dozen of Russian customers, each of whom wants to spend more than £ 20 million on the purchase of a new house in the very center of London ... They are arranged only by addresses in Belgravia, on a nursery, Maifyer or Rigent Park-a prestigious postal index.”
Closing the laser “offshore is a very simple way for laundering money earned through corruption and other crimes. And the use of offshore companies when buying real estate is very common in the UK. Just comparing these two facts, we say that this is a big risk to the British economy, and we must make efforts to achieve the transparency of these transactions, ”Maxwell said in an interview with NT .
In the report prepared under his leadership, Transparenational International proposes to extend to the real estate market the rule by which each British company must disclose the name of its beneficiary in the national register. This is a new legislation that should enter into force before the end of 2015.
“We propose to extend this legislation to foreign companies to which real estate is registered, including offshore, so that they work according to the same standards for information disclosure as British,” he said.
Among other recommendations, Transparency International states that not only real estate sellers should be subjected to “cleanliness” of capital, but also its buyers, and that when filling out the national cadastre, offshore companies must be obliged to disclose the same information as the companies registered in Britain.
Maxwell added that the report “Corruption on the threshold of your home. How corruption is used to buy real estate in Britain ”is only a part of a large report that Transparency International is going to release in June, and on which centers are operating in different countries. A large report will talk about how the money earned on corruption and essentially stolen at the poorest segments of the population is laundered in other ways - through lobbying for state projects, through collecting objects of antiquity and arts, through pharmacological companies.
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