Every Monday morning, we publish an updated list of every PLC in the UK that has failed to file its accounts on time. Sometimes a company is on the list because of a Companies House delay/error. More often, it’s because the company is troubled, bust, or incompetent. And occasionally it reveals an active fraud. Despite […]

A new analysis by Tax Policy Associates shows that 900,000 UK companies have no UK directors – all their directors live abroad. This is permitted by current UK company law – but our analysis finds that these companies are seventeen times more likely to show signs of fraud than companies with at least one UK […]

A mining giant claiming £4bn in revenue, certified by a fake auditor on 128 pages of meticulously detailed fake accounts. A bank with a login page that can’t log anyone in. A trust holding $327bn in Tsarist gold that never existed. Even endorsements from the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, Nadhim Zahawi, and Baroness Mone […]

We’ve been reporting on the shockingly brazen accounting frauds that slip through Companies House. Our new web-based fraud-finding tool takes just a few clicks to expose suspicious companies. We hope it’s useful to everyone interested in uncovering fraud, and helps illustrate how easy it would be for Companies House to do a better job of […]

We’ve created an automated search tool that crawls Companies House data to find companies with fraudulent accounts. It’s found hundreds of dubious companies, the worst of which claims £100 trillion of assets. Our findings suggest that Companies House is asleep at the wheel. But they also show that it would be straightforward to clean things […]

Avis Capital Limited is one of the largest companies in the UK. It says it was spun out from Avis (the car hire company), is FCA-regulated and has £58bn of net assets. It promises investors a 31% return. But all of this is a lie. Avis Capital’s accounts are a work of fiction. It’s completely […]

This page contains an automatically-updated list of every public limited company that’s missed the deadline for filing its confirmation statement. Listed companies are highlighted in yellow, and FCA-regulated companies in red. The confirmation statement used to be called the “annual return” – it’s simply a short confirmation that the company’s details held with Companies House […]