The billionaire and the tax evading gift shops
Asif Aziz's Criterion Capital manages a row of high-profile gift shops at Piccadilly Circus. So why does his team keep renting them to students who vanish without paying millions of pounds in taxes?
Underneath a concrete viaduct carrying the Docklands Light Railway away from Canary Wharf sits the abandoned Naval Row Car Park, an exposed and ugly place, covered in piles of flytipped rubbish. It’s here that a gift shop owner called Safdar Ali told the authorities they should write to him with any queries about his business.
Little is known about Ali, other than the fact he is a 35-year-old Pakistani national. It’s not clear if he ever actually lived or worked under the viaduct. All that’s certain is that he listed car park spaces 116, 127 and 128 as the registered correspondence address for his booming Piccadilly Circus gift shop business.
That was until he vanished, leaving behind hundreds of thousands of pounds in unpaid taxes. Letters to him keep being returned from the abandoned car park. The expectation is that his company will never pay the money it owes.
Despite the unpaid taxes his gift shop continues to trade in the centre of London with a new legal owner. All of this is taking place in a shop unit rented from a company founded by one of Britain’s richest men: Asif Aziz.
London’s gift shops and the order of the phoenix.
Today, London Centric sets out a story of repeated and brazen tax evasion, taking place in plain sight in a row of gift shops on one of the busiest streets in the capital. It appears to have cost taxpayers millions of pounds over the last decade and shows no sign of ending.
Yet there is little indication that the tax authorities are taking it seriously, even at a time when chancellor Rachel Reeves is desperately scrabbling to raise money. Legitimate London businesses say they will have to close because they cannot compete with gift shops that don’t pay tax. The leader of the local Westminster council is openly begging the central government and the tax authorities to intervene.
Earlier this month Joe Powell, the Labour MP for Kensington and Bayswater, stood up in the House of Commons and used parliamentary privilege to suggest some central London gift shops are regularly engaged in “phoenixing”, where the legal owner of a shop changes every few months and the old owner vanishes without ever paying their taxes.
Powell cited London Centric’s reporting on this topic and challenged officials from HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) to walk a few hundred metres from their headquarters on Whitehall to investigate.
HMRC doesn’t seem to have acted. So London Centric decided to conduct our own investigation into the tenants of two shops based in the Trocadero building next to Piccadilly Circus: Kingdom of Treats and Souvenir Megastore. They are next door to a former Harry Potter gift shop which we have previously investigated for its failure to pay taxes.
We sent journalists to knock on doors at dozens of addresses across London, Oxford, and Edinburgh where the legal operators of the shops supposedly live or work, to ask whether they intended to pay their taxes. We also sent an undercover reporter to monitor the amount of money that was going through the tills at the shops. We did this because we believe it is in the public interest.
The legal tenants of these gift shops are often overseas students from India, Pakistan, or Bangladesh. When we turned up at the registered address given by these tenants we found overcrowded flats, abandoned offices, or even the flytipped car park. In most cases the registered director had either vanished elsewhere or left the country by the time we arrived, with stacks of unopened legal letters and tax demands visible through letterboxes.
All of the supposed gift shop “owners” we looked into leased their properties from Criterion Capital, a company founded by the billionaire property developer Asif Aziz.
Aziz, known as “Mr West End” for his dominance of the capital’s property scene, is keen to rub shoulders with the mayor of London and portrays himself as one of the capital’s leading philanthropists. According to The Times and the Daily Mail, the billionaire moved his tax residency to Abu Dhabi at the end of last year amid concerns the Labour government could increase the tax burden on wealthy individuals.
There is no legal responsibility for a landlord to enforce the payment of taxes by their tenants, nor any suggestion that Aziz should be paying the bill. Lawyers for Aziz said that while he is a founder of Criterion Capital, he is “not involved in the matter of day to day lettings” and this is a matter for “the commercial letting team at Criterion Capital.”
The lawyers said Aziz and Criterion deny any involvement in “phoenixing”, said “lettings are made to commercial tenants on standard commercial terms”, and a landlord is “entitled to let to tenants who will pay a market rate for the property.”
But today’s London Centric investigation is asking:
Why does a property company controlled by one of London’s richest men keep leasing expensive shop units to students with no obvious retail experience — only for those students to repeatedly vanish without paying millions of pounds in taxes?
How we reported this story:
This London Centric investigation has taken months of work and resources. We visited domestic addresses across the country, ranging from Hounslow to Dagenham and up to Oxford and Edinburgh. We also sent undercover reporters and a photographer to the shops in question, employed an illustrator to explain what was going on, and bought a lot of souvenirs in a bid to trace the financial transactions.
Due to the high cost of this work, we expect to lose money on this story. We did it because we believe in proper investigative local reporting about London — and because there has to be more to journalism than clickbait.
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1. “They’re not money laundering. They’re taking serious money.”
The missing VAT.
The gift shop trade in central London is bringing in vast sums of cash. A common misconception is that no one is actually buying any of the expensive sweets or Princess Diana memorial mugs on offer. We found this could not be further from the truth.
“Everyone says they’re money laundering,” explained a former tenant of one of Asif Aziz’s units, who shared details of the shops’ operations with London Centric. “They’re not money laundering. They’re taking serious money.”
To verify this London Centric sent an undercover reporter, pretending to be a lost tourist, to two of the shops to stand by the tills for an hour in late afternoon and total up every single purchase.
We found the Kingdom of Treats sweet shop on Coventry Street took £660 in just one hour, as families filled baskets with sweets and penis-shaped pasta.
When we repeated the exercise next door at The Souvenir Megastore, the reporter watched as staff ran through purchases worth £643 in an hour, thanks to a brisk trade in Big Ben-themed keyrings, royalist rubber ducks, and ‘English tea’ selection sets.
If this rate of spend was kept up for their stated opening hours, each of the shops would bring in millions of pounds a year — the sort of income that a legitimate business would require to pay the high rents, business rates, and taxes that such a large, prominent central London retail unit would usually attract.
Yet one thing was missing from all of the sales: VAT, the 20% sales tax levied on most purchases. When our reporter bought goods and asked for a VAT receipt in the gift shop, the till operator told us that “we don’t charge VAT here”. There was a similar story next door at Kingdom of Treats.
This is strange because businesses are required by law to start charging VAT when they expect their annual turnover will hit £90,000 — something these shops could easily surpass in a matter of weeks based on these sales figures.
“What you have done is exactly how HMRC have always checked businesses for tax evasion: counting purchases to estimate turnover,” said tax reform campaigner Dan Neidle of Tax Associates. “It’s hard to understand why HMRC haven’t been doing that."
A former tenant of one of the units told London Centric that the business model of many central London gift shops is based on two factors. First, the knowledge that authorities are failing to enforce tax laws when it comes high street businesses. And secondly, the ease with which overseas students can be paid a few thousand pounds to sign legal paperwork on behalf of the real operators — before vanishing without paying taxes.
When we shared our findings with HMRC, they said they could not comment on individual cases but encouraged us to send our data to their fraud team, which we have done.
None of the gift shop operators responded to detailed requests for comment about their tax affairs. Lawyers for Aziz and Criterion said they are not involved with the inner workings of the gift shop operators or the gift shop operators’ compliance with tax law and would assist HMRC with any investigations.
2. “The income from the business goes to another company or individual. We have not been able to ascertain who.”
The missing business rates.
Business rates are the corporate equivalent of the council tax that most of us pay on our place of residence. If you rent a shop or office, you have to pay a set sum to the local council.
In the case of the shops we investigated, dozens of limited companies that rented out the units have collectively failed to pay millions of pounds in business rates to the local Westminster Council.
Instead, every few months a new sign is put up behind the till announcing a different company is now operating the still-trading shop. In the eye of the passing consumer, nothing has changed and the gift shop remains open. In the eye of the law, a different company with a different director is now legally in charge of the business.
Documents seen by London Centric suggest seven different companies have occupied the shop unit currently known as Kingdom of Treats between 2017 and 2024, with all of them failing to pay business rates. This has left the council out of pocket to the tune of more than £3m.
Souvenir Megastore, the gift shop next door, is split between multiple companies. The documents suggest they have collectively failed to pay almost a million pounds in business rates over recent years, with the real sum at risk expected to be higher. There is a similar story at the former Harry Potter souvenir shop in the same building.
In total we visited 17 addresses across the country linked to the supposed “owners” of these shops, many of whom gave their profession as “student”. None of the residences had the director present when we asked and most of the doors were answered by people who were either baffled by our questions or showed us piles of unopened legal letters addressed to the person in question. One company that rented part of the gift shop was registered to an office block in an Edgware business park, which has been vacant since 2023 — when it was used to lease one of the shops. Unopened legal correspondence was taped to the office door.
Westminster council leader Adam Hug, the Labour politician in charge of the area, expressed deep despair. He said our findings are part of a wider problem across central London and his council is repeatedly having to write off the millions of pounds in unpaid tax from shops such as this. He said there is no need for new laws, simply a willingness by central government to enforce existing rules — and gain tens of millions of pounds of extra tax revenue in the process.
Hug said: “A number of the candy stores and souvenir shops which sprang up across the West End in the wake of covid use a complex web of shell companies and directors to mask who the real owners are. This can make enforcement frustrating as it is difficult to establish who you are actually dealing with.”
“We can impound illegal vapes and unsafe sweets all day long, but without broader government action enforcement is a bit like playing whack-a-mole.”
One official singled out the three units in the Trocadero building that are owned by Asif Aziz’s Criterion Capital: "We believe that the companies quoted above are in fact just ‘shell’ companies… and the income from the business goes to another company or individual. We have not been able to ascertain who.”
They said the publicly-declared directors “are likely to be students paid a small fee to put their names to Companies House records” on behalf of others.
Lawyers for Aziz and Criterion Capital, who said they would comply with all requests from the local authority for assistance, told us they “would not get involved in registering tenants for business rates” and they are not responsible for the payment of such taxes: “Criterion Capital’s remit, once a letting is made to a tenant is to ensure that the tenant complies with its lease obligations.”
They added: “To the extent that the tenant is complying with its obligations under the lease our client has no basis to call for information relating to their inner workings. Where tenants breach their lease terms or fail to pay rent landlords will take appropriate action which includes forfeiture of the leases and or other remedies through the court.”
3. “Our takings are down 40% because we charge VAT and file accounts.”
The missing corporation tax.
The final act of a “phoenixing” company is failing to file accounts with Companies House and avoiding paying corporation tax. At this point the company is abandoned and a new one rises, like phoenix from the flames.
Despite signing up to all the legal requirements of being a company director in the UK, the individuals who run the business tend to vanish when the time comes to file the required paperwork. In the case of the three gift shops managed by Criterion near Piccadilly Circus, we have identified at least 10 different tenants of gift shops that failed to file their accounts in the last five years — and that’s just in three retail units, on one street, with one landlord.
All of this tax evasion hurts legitimate operators who do cough up.
“Our takings are down 40% because we charge VAT and file accounts,” said Bill Tulloch of House of Spells, a legitimate Harry Potter gift shop on Charing Cross Road. He said his company simply can’t compete on price with gift shops that never pay their taxes: “It’s put a big strain on our business. We’ll have to find a solution or else we might have to close.”
HMRC told us: “We’re committed to pursuing company directors and other individuals when we suspect there are tax risks linked to phoenixism and we’ll continue to use our civil and criminal powers against those who refuse to play by the rules.”
“We work closely with partners including the Insolvency Service and Companies House to tackle evasion in retail and online services, and support honest businesses.” Lawyers for Criterion said their clients “will comply with any and all requests for assistance” which HMRC might need.
The future: “Today, if you're honest and you have integrity and you work hard, Abu Dhabi is a place where that can happen.”
There is no suggestion that Aziz or Criterion Capital are legally responsible for the tax affairs of their tenants. Indeed, despite regularly describing how he revived the Trocadero in media interviews, Aziz’s lawyers are now keen to distance the property developer himself from his flagship building. They emphasise that Aziz has transferred ownership of the Trocadero building to an off-shore trust based in the tax haven of the Isle of Man, which has the effect of concealing its true legal owner.
In recent years the billionaire has increasingly used his media appearances to promote his philanthropic Aziz Foundation, which is run by his daughter.
Everyone London Centric spoke to who had dealt with the Aziz Foundation praised its work on behalf of young British Muslims, which includes funding masters degrees at prestigious universities, organising internships with members of parliament and leading news organisations, plus helping to pay for London’s annual Ramadan lights.
Yet the charity’s annual spending of £1.7m on good causes is dwarfed by the amount that has been lost to the state in unpaid tax by tenants who are occupying gift shop units in a building controlled by the Aziz family business.
Whenever the billionaire walks into his London headquarters he has to pass the tourists heading into the downmarket gift shops that are the subject of this investigation. He is now set to leave the UK for Abu Dhabi, reportedly amid concerns about the Labour government’s plans to increase taxes on the wealthy.
"One reads about America 50 years ago, where if you work hard, all your dreams could come true,” the billionaire told a journalist last month. "Today, if you're honest and you have integrity and you work hard, Abu Dhabi is a place where that can happen.”
Today, London Centric has a final question for Asif Aziz, as he prepares to leave the UK for Abu Dhabi.
Will he, for the public good and to ensure taxes are paid, order his staff to carry out extra checks on the ability of his gift shop tenants to pay large tax bills — and will he urge HMRC to investigate the tax affairs of his existing and previous tenants?
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An excellent piece of work, but so infuriating. We Londoners are meant to be angry with people claiming benefits they aren't entitled to, people shoplifting, people fare-dodging - because it's stealing from all of us. Meanwhile this obvious robbery of the public purse is allowed to continue and the freeholder can just laugh all the way to the bank.
At this point I wonder if HMRC are avoiding investigation intentionally.
Impressive journalism here, really.