The Tudor mansion fit for a king, and possibly a Russian oligarch
How do you seize a house if you can’t prove who owns it?
That’s the question facing the UK government which, having talked tough about sanctioning oligarchs, could now be hamstrung by the country’s knotty property ownership structures.
The scale of the challenge facing ministers is brought to life by the curious case of Sutton Place, a sprawling, Grade I-listed manor house built in Surrey for a courtier of Henry VIII.
Almost 20 years after the home last changed hands, the identity of its ultimate buyer remains a mystery.
The government claims the house now belongs to Alisher Usmanov, the Uzbekistan-born Russian multi-billionaire who once tried to buy Arsenal football club and was recently slapped with sanctions. But Usmanov’s people have cast doubt on that assertion.
A spokesperson for billionaire Alisher Usmanov cast doubt on the oligarch’s ownership of Sutton Place. The registered owners are listed on the Land Registry as two Cyprus-incorporated companies © David Cooper/Alamy
The ownership of the estate can be traced back as far as 1521 when it was entrusted by Henry VIII to the diplomat Sir Richard Weston.
Fast forward to more recent times and the manor was bought in the late 1950s by the American oil baron John Paul Getty, who sold it to the art collector Stanley J. Seeger until it was purchased by the late industrial scion Frederick R. Koch (not to be confused with his Republican mega-donor younger brothers). But since the eldest Koch put the place up for sale in 1999, the trail became harder to follow.
George Hammond, the FT’s property correspondent, tried to find an answer by pulling at a thread that runs from the 16th-century house, through an office in Nicosia, Cyprus, and has tangential links to a battered industrial estate in Bounds Green, north London.
It was there where opposite a nursery and a shop selling bathroom tiles he found the registered offices of one company named “Arsenal Minerals” and another directed by a Russian who built his fortune in vodka and real estate and who once was a business partner of Usmanov.
But among the clues, there was no definitive answer to the vexed question of the Tudor manor’s ownership.
Instead, the hunt for an owner shines a light on the opaque, convoluted ownership structures that have helped make UK property a preferred destination for the global wealthy to park their millions (or billions) discreetly.
The government is looking to rein in the system by introducing a register of ownership long called for by transparency campaigners.
The measures used by the super-rich to disguise ownership date back to the Middle Ages, when noblemen fighting wars overseas placed their land in trusts, while retaining rights to use the land and benefiting if it was sold.
“That’s how landed estates remained intact in England,” explained one property lawyer. “But no one was using offshore companies in Antigua during the Crusades.”