Yesterday 3 UK newspapers published political and business news related to British Virgin Islands companies.
The Sunday Times put the post Barclays link in drug cash route that described the investigation related to Barclays Private Bank (BPB) transactions. The British investigators, following the dirty money trail, came to the account of a BPB client Auxerre Ltd. The investigation revealed that in 1997-2001 1.8 million USD had been deposited in Auxerre accounts at Barclays in 53 wire transfers.
Auxerre Ltd. is a British Virgin Islands company. It had tens of millions of dollars in five Barclays accounts. BVI company Auxerre has been owned by an elderly textile magnate Jose Douer-Ambar from Bogota, Colombia. The British investigators examined accounts held by Douer at HSBC in London and ABN Amro in Jersey - 60 wire transfers totalling 5.7 million USD and 2 deposits totalling 4 million USD respectively. The money in the frozen accounts was released back to Douer after he arranged his deal with the US authorities. He has now moved it out of Britain.
The second story was published the same day by The Guardian. It described allegations submitted to the Electoral Commission. It is assumed that the Conservative party used a complex real estate transaction that involved its former London headquarters in order to raise foreign funds, which is unlawful.
The Tories moved out of Smith Square 3 years ago but acquired the freehold on the property and an adjoining building, for 15 million GBP that had previously belonged to a British Virgin Islands company Platinum Overseas Holdings Ltd. One source told the correspondent that BVI company Platinum Overseas Holdings was owned by a group of Middle Eastern businessmen, clients of the Citibank, US. So, the Electoral Commission responsible for monitoring the funding of political parties confirmed the fact of the investigation but did not reveal any details.
Mail on Sunday, again, a UK nespaper, published its story on a wireless service company Hybyte sending unwanted jokes to cell phone users and charging money for that. Companies House informs that shares of private limited company Hybyte are held in the British Virgin Islands.
In spite of the fact that the company has already been fined for the above matter banned for 6 months from offering the service, it still continued to send the unwanted and unordered messages and charge them 1.5 GBP per joke. Some people demand their money back, so Hybyte must refund these people.
To conclude and sum up what was published by UK press this Sunday, this was definitely a "black Sunday" for BVI companies image. However, it is quite likely that this was just a coincidence and no "war" against BVI companies is going to emerge. It goes without saying that many negative information on wherever-based companies is published daily all over the world and the amount of information related with BVI-based companies in the ocean of negative information is really tiny.
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