What do peel holdings own

The low-profile company controlled by a billionaire tax exile. Tom Harper , The Independent, Oct. Handy Shipping Guide, Feb. Competition Policy International, Mar. International Bulk Journal, May. EastPort UK , Mar. Original archived on Jan. The Sunday Times Fast Track Show Filters.

Security Alert: We have been made aware of fraudulent activity conducted by a company trading as Peel Finance UK Limited, purportedly offering investment to third parties.

Follow us on social media. Sign up to our newsletter Full Name. Company Name. Email Address. Its investment decisions have had an enormous impact, whether for good or ill, on the places where millions of people live and work. He built Peel Holdings in the s and 80s by buying up a series of companies whose fortunes had decayed, but which still controlled valuable land.

Foremost among these was the Manchester Ship Canal Company, purchased in The canal turned out to be valuable not simply as a freight route, but also because of the redevelopment potential of the land that flanked it.

Peel Holdings tends not to show its hand in public. Like many companies, it prefers its forays into public political debate to be conducted via intermediary bodies and corporate coalitions. The charge was aimed at cutting traffic and reducing the toxic car fumes choking the city. But Peel, as owners of the out-of-town Trafford Centre shopping mall, feared that a congestion charge would be bad for business, discouraging shoppers from driving through central Manchester to reach the mall.

Throughout England, cash-strapped councils are being outgunned by corporate developers pressing to get their way. The situation is exacerbated by a system that has allowed companies like Peel to keep their corporate structures obscure and their landholdings hidden.

This gives you the name of its parent company, Peel Investments Holdings Ltd. So far, so good. But then repeat the steps for the parent company, and yet another holding company emerges; then another, and another. Until recently, it was even harder to get a handle on the land Peel Holdings owns. While Peel Holdings is unusual for the sheer amount of land it controls, it is also illustrative of corporate landowners everywhere.

Corporations looking to develop land have numerous tricks up their sleeve that they can use to evade scrutiny and get their way, from shell company structures to offshore entities.

Companies with big enough budgets can often ride roughshod over the planning system, beating cash-strapped councils and volunteer community groups. And companies have for a long time benefited from having their landholdings kept secret, giving them the element of surprise when it comes to lobbying councils over planning decisions and the use of public space. But now, at long last, that is starting to change.

He asked it to release a database detailing the area of land owned by all UK-registered companies and corporate bodies. Eriksson later shared this database with me, and what it revealed was astonishing. Here, laid bare after the dataset had been cleaned up, was a picture of corporate control: companies today own about 2. In the unpromising format of an Excel spreadsheet, a compelling picture emerged. Alongside the utilities privatised by Margaret Thatcher and John Major — the water companies, in particular — and the big corporate landowners, were PLCs with multiple shareholders.

There were household names, such as Tesco, Tata Steel and the housebuilder Taylor Wimpey, and others more obscure. MRH Minerals, for example, appeared to own 28, hectares of land, making it one of the biggest corporate landowners in England and Wales.

Gradually, I pieced together a list of what looked to be the top 50 landowning companies, which together own more than , hectares of England and Wales. Peel Holdings and many of its subsidiaries, unsurprisingly, feature high on the list. But while the dataset revealed in stark detail the area of land owned by UK-based companies, it did nothing to tell us what they owned, and where. That would take another two years to emerge.

Meanwhile, Eriksson had been busy at work with his Private Eye colleague Richard Brooks and the computer programmer Anna Powell-Smith, delving into another form of corporate landowner — firms based overseas, yet owning land in the UK. Of particular interest were companies based in offshore tax havens, a wholly legal but controversial practice, given the opportunities offshore ownership gives for possible tax avoidance and for concealing the identities of who ultimately controls a company.

Some potentially had an even darker motive: purchasing property in England or Wales as a means for kleptocratic regimes or corrupt businessmen to launder money, and to get a healthy return on their ill-gotten gains in the process.

This was information that clearly ought to be out in the open, with a huge public interest case for doing so.