London Centric goes to Edinburgh
Plus: A chat with the Transport for London boss running the tube strike negotiations — and how the "hardworking businessman" putting up flags in south London tried to scam an insurer.
During August a chunk of London’s population heads to Edinburgh for various festivals and events, whether it’s to watch comedy at the Fringe, to join American tourists heading to the Tattoo, or to hobnob with media executives at the television festival.
London Centric also headed to the Scottish capital last month. But we were there to check out another lead in our ongoing investigation into the activities of landlord Asif Aziz — and why his London-based property company keeps leasing prominent buildings to tax-evading gift shops. We’re publishing our findings in collaboration with The Edinburgh Minute, and you can scroll down to read them.
But first, we’re in London, where we’ve got an interview with the man leading negotiations with the RMT union over next week’s London Underground strikes.
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Transport for London boss speaks to London Centric about next week’s tube strike
The London Underground is set to largely shut down from Sunday night until Friday morning, unless either Transport for London or the RMT union blinks over demands for a shorter week.
Staff currently tend to work for 35 hours a week although, as we reported back in March, there is now a union push to cut that to 32 hours. Although the RMT represents many tube drivers it also represents far more staff working in stations, behind the scenes, and in depots.
The union has said their members are going on strike because bosses “refused to engage seriously” with demands on “pay, fatigue management, extreme shift patterns and a reduction in the working week, as well as failing to honour previous agreements made with staff”.
Coldplay and Post Malone have already postponed their gigs at Wembley and Tottenham stadiums as they are unable to get event licenses due to the strike. However, several factors may slightly mitigate the impact of the seemingly inevitable industrial action. The Elizabeth line through central London will be running (albeit with reduced hours at some central London stations) as will the Overground, along with the DLR on Monday and Wednesday. Plus, the shift to cycling and the rapid spread of rental e-bikes such as Lime means there’s hundreds of thousands of extra vehicles available to circumvent the stalled network.
Nick Dent, director of customer operations for London Underground, is the man leading pay negotiations with the RMT union. He took time out from strike planning on Friday to talk. (We’ve also invited the RMT to have their say.)
Q: What is the current gap between your position and the RMT’s?
Dent: “We've made a fair and affordable offer [of a 3.4% pay rise], which we'd like the RMT to put to their members and suspend strike action. The RMT have told us that they would like us to reduce the working week or have more time away from work. This is simply unaffordable and stretching operational budgets would simply mean that we have less money to invest in the network and the services that we can provide to London.”
Q: Do you have any hope that there will be more negotiations over the weekend?
“We do remain in touch with the RMT. There are no talks scheduled but we are absolutely open for talks. We have met them twice this week, and four times in the last two weeks. What they've said to us is that they will only entertain proposals that reduce the working week.
“We've asked them to reflect on that position, but particularly put the fair and affordable offer that we've made to their members. It's not too late to do that. They could suspend the action and organise that referendum of their members. In the meantime we absolutely would engage with the RMT, we're available for talks all weekend, and we’re also preparing for what will be a very challenging week if these strikes go ahead.”
Q: Do you think the public are understanding of the RMT's position on this? Who wouldn't want a shorter working week if you could realistically get your boss to agree to it?
“We think our terms are favourable. It's a 35-hour contractual week. They get seven weeks off. There are rest days that are banked so people have potentially more time off than that. The issue of a fatigue has been raised and we are trying to engage them with numerous suggestions of how we can better improve that.
“I think Londoners probably aren't interested in taking sides. They just want us to provide the service, and that's what we want to do. The RMT have accepted very similar offers elsewhere [on the UK rail network] and that's after putting offers to their members. None of those offers came with reduced working hours. They were just pay offers, very similar to ours, and they have been accepted. So it's disappointing that they've not accepted it here [in London] or at least put the offer to the members to have a say. “
The “hardworking businessman” hanging flags in London and the £98,000 false injury claim
The BBC this week profiled a man who is leading the campaign to hang union flags on lampposts in south west London. Billy Cooper from Carshalton told the broadcaster that he is part of a 30-strong group in Sutton putting up British flags amid a national wave of flag-raising, saying he is hoisting union jacks out of "British pride" and the costs of putting up the flags are covered by "hardworking business people" like himself.
What the article, which was carried prominently on the BBC’s channels, didn’t mention was that in 2018 Cooper was ordered to pay Aviva more than £13,000 after he tried to falsely claim £98,000 from the insurer. Cooper told the insurer that he was unable to work as a roofer following a car accident — a lie exposed by posts on his social media accounts showing him working. According to contemporary reports, first noted by a Bluesky user under the name Rich Fiend, the court found Cooper’s insurance claim had been "fundamentally dishonest".
When contacted by London Centric about his past, Cooper confirmed that he was both the man putting up flags in the BBC article and the false injury claimant. He also, unprompted, told us: "I don't know what that has to do with the racist claims. Does it mean I'm racist against insurance companies now?"
London Centric Investigates: Why this Edinburgh building is part of a London gift shop tax evasion mystery
By Jim Waterson, Cormac Kehoe, Andrew Naughtie and Rachel Rees
In the middle of Edinburgh’s Princes Street sits a former Debenhams department store that used to be one of the city’s most iconic shops.
Today the property in the Scottish capital is owned by an off-shore business linked to one of Britain’s richest men, the London landlord Asif Aziz. Since last summer the billionaire’s property company Criterion Capital has leased the store to three shabby gift shops that add to the street’s current down-at-heel look.
The Edinburgh shops, which include an unofficial Harry Potter merchandise store and a Kingdom of Treats candy shop, will be familiar to readers of London Centric — or anyone who has spent time in central London in recent years.
They even share the exact same branding as other tax-evading gift shops we have identified as operating in Aziz’s London buildings near Piccadilly Circus.
Now, an investigation we are publishing in collaboration with the Edinburgh Minute, can reveal:
The Princes Street gift shops have so far failed to pay hundreds of thousands of pounds in non-domestic rates (equivalent to the English “business rates”) to Edinburgh council.
The gift shops are operated, according to legal filings, by a series of young Indian nationals with no obvious experience of running high street retail empires or links to Scotland. They gave their addresses as flats in London, raising doubts about whether they are really running the Edinburgh gift shops — or if they are just frontmen who have signed legal paperwork.
While the gift shops are often wrongly dismissed as money laundering fronts that have no real customers, our undercover reporter found one gift shop on Princes Street is making substantial sales. This instead raises questions about why it is not charging VAT to customers.
The gift shops show signs of “phoenixing” — a technical term for when a business continues to trade but is quietly taken over by a new legal owner, enabling past debts and taxes to disappear. Although Aziz’s lawyers told us his company is not responsible for the payment of these taxes by their tenants, the same practice was uncovered by London Centric at many of Aziz’s London properties.
Tracing the owners of the Edinburgh gift shops involved a team of London Centric reporters knocking on addresses across the UK. Our investigation into high street tax evasion started with a single Harry Potter shop in London but has now led us via Oxford, and Liverpool to Edinburgh — and what we increasingly believe to be a national scandal hiding in plain sight that HMRC and governments are failing to take seriously.
The mystery gift shop owners who sign the paperwork — then vanish
Walk into the Edinburgh Gift Vault shop on Princes Street and you’ll see people queuing up to buy tartan tat. Families laugh as they look at solar powered dancing versions of the late Queen Elizabeth II, Mr Bean keyrings, and bagpiper snow globes. Next door sits a Harry Potter-themed store, while a sweet shop called Kingdom of Treats completes the trio that opened last summer in the former Debenhams.
Many people seem to think that these shops do not have any real customers. But when we sent an undercover reporter in to stand by the tills and total up every purchase, we found the opposite.
In one 40-minute period in the Edinburgh Gift Vault we saw £281.81 go through the tills, suggesting the shops could be making more than £4,000 a day. Curiously, none of the shops charged VAT on any of the test purchases we made — something that would be legally required if they expect to sell more than £90,000 of goods in a year.
The person responsible for ensuring compliance with tax law at all three gift shops in the Edinburgh building is the man renting them, a 31-year-old Indian national called Mohammad Maasoom. He runs his Edinburgh retail empire from a small upstairs flat above a shop on a busy road in Uxbridge, west London, an unlikely base for a Scottish retail magnate.
It’s not clear how Maasoom came to lease and operate three gift shops on Edinburgh’s main shopping street or how he is able to afford to rent some of the city’s most expensive retail units from Asif Aziz’s property company. He has no visible track record in business and did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
When we did visit his registered London flat we found no one at home. Instead, there was a pile of unopened legal letters in the postbox addressed to Kitfox Ltd, Maasoom’s recently-formed limited company that legally runs the gift shops — and in which Maasoom is the only shareholder and director.
In other similar gift shop cases investigated by London Centric there has been strong evidence that young students from India are offered small sums of money by unknown individuals to put their names on company paperwork. In the process, they become legally responsible for paying all taxes — then vanish when the money is due. In this manner the shops can trade at a far higher profit margin than outlets that do pay their taxes, while costing the government millions of pounds in lost revenue.
The other man who also supposedly ran the same Edinburgh retail empire from a different flat in London
Intriguingly, Maasoom is the already the second operator of the Edinburgh gift shops, even though they have only been open for a year.
Until very recently they were run by Urban Emporium Ltd, a company legally owned by another Londoner called Asshad Moolayil Noushad. He is another young Indian national with no obvious business record or connection to Scotland. When we visited his registered address at a crowded flat in Hoxton, east London, the current occupants expressed bafflement at his name and said they had no idea who he is. Again, Noushad did not respond to requests to comment, while post has been returned unopened to Companies House, who are in the process of striking off the company.
There are no signs that Urban Emporium has paid any corporation taxes or is likely to file any of the required legal paperwork. Sources also suggested it owes an outstanding substantial six figure debt in non-domestic rates to Edinburgh council that is unlikely to be recovered. In total the unpaid VAT, non-domestic rates, and corporation tax bill could be far higher.
The transition from one legal owner to the other while the shops remained open shows indications of phoenixing — a process of evading taxes which is increasingly gaining the attention of MPs in the House of Commons as a threat to the UK’s tax revenue.
All of this poses a question: Why is the landlord of the Princes Street shops letting some of Edinburgh’s most prominent retail units to unknown shop operators who fail to pay their taxes?
Asif Aziz: The London landlord who might be able to answer our questions
Asif Aziz is a billionaire who has also been described as the UK’s “meanest” landlord. After running a trading business in Angola, he returned to London in the mid-2000s and rapidly began building up a property empire now valued in the billions of pounds. In recent years he has repositioned himself as a major philanthropist, often posing alongside mayor of London Sadiq Khan.
This year London Centric has reported how the billionaire and his Criterion Capital property development company have changed London. We have revealed how his company has:
Repeatedly leased out some of London’s most prominent shop units to tax-evading Harry Potter gift shops.
Posed a threat to the future of not one but two central London arthouse cinemas, while evicting the world’s oldest YMCA from its headquarters.
Paid £150,000 to settle claims he ran a knock-off Forrest Gump-themed shrimp restaurant, which got the landlord sued by Paramount.
Run a cockroach-infested housing block in London, branded by one review site as “the worst place to live in Croydon”.
Having started in the capital, he is now turning his attention to Edinburgh, where his Criterion Capital company plans to transform the former Debenhams building into one of its Zedwell windowless hotels.
Yet until that happens Criterion has chosen to capitalise on the site by leasing it out to the gift shops. There is no suggestion that Aziz or Criterion Capital are legally responsible for the tax affairs of their tenants in London, Edinburgh, or elsewhere.
But there is one mystery that links the London and Edinburgh shop units, which we believe merits further investigation by governments and tax authorities — and which is why this London news outlet has strayed north of the border.
In London, Aziz’s Criterion Capital has repeatedly let a prominent retail unit at Piccadilly Circus to a tax-evading sweet shop that trades under the name ‘Kingdom of Treats’, ostensibly run by a series of young Indian nationals who vanish when the taxes are due.
In Edinburgh, it has repeatedly let a prominent retail unit on Princes Street to a tax-evading sweet shop that also trades under the name ‘Kingdom of Treats’, ostensibly run by a different set of young Indian nationals who have failed to pay their taxes.
These appear to be the only two shops in the UK called ‘Kingdom of Treats’.
And the only public link between the two tax-evading ‘Kingdom of Treats’ shops in the two capitals appears to be Asif Aziz’s property development company, which is the landlord in both cases.
Aziz, Criterion, and the gift shops operators did not respond to requests for comment on whether this is pure coincidence. The billionaire is now in the process of relocating to Abu Dhabi, having reportedly raised concerns about the tax burden of a Labour government.
How the failure to pay taxes “robs the taxpayer”
When presented with our findings, Edinburgh council leader Jane Meagher said: “When businesses avoid paying non-domestic rates, it not only robs the taxpayer and our city’s services of vital funding, it’s also unfair on the thousands of honest Edinburgh businesses who play by the rules. We are committed to targeting and disrupting rogue businesses, by using all the enforcement powers at our disposal and working with our partners in government and the police.
She said that Princes Street is a “vital part of our local economy” and pointed to the opening of lifestyle brand MINISO and fashion retailer UNIQLO on the street, as well as the nearby St James Quarter shopping mall and Johnnie Walker visitor centre. She also promised a forthcoming tourist tax would help revive the area: “Our ground-breaking visitor levy presents another opportunity to invest tens of millions of pounds in preserving and enhancing the features that make our city such a fantastic place to both visit and live all year round.”
Aziz and the directors did not respond to a request for comment but their lawyer previously 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 also say their clients “will comply with any and all requests for assistance” which HMRC might need.
Criterion’s lawyers previously said: “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.”
Meanwhile, tourists continue to spend big money on expensive sweets and gifts from the various shops on Piccadilly Circus and Princes Street — while the people of London, Edinburgh and the rest of the UK remain largely unaware that the stores are not paying their taxes.
If you want to get in touch with London Centric then message us on WhatsApp or email — or click below to leave a comment.
Just read this in the Edinburgh Minute. Do you have any faith in the authorities to do anything?
Criterion's solicitor claims their only responsibility is to hold their tenant to the terms of their retail commercial lease, but in my experience, it is normal for retail leases to include a clause that the occupier must pay their taxes. e.g. here's the clause from a Sainsbury's commercial lease for a store premises I am familiar with (these leases are usually available to buy from the Land Registry as the rent is high enough to meet the requirement for mandatory registration): "To pay all existing and future rates, taxes, charges, assessments and outgoings which may at any time during the Term be assessed charged or imposed upon or payable in respect of or by the owner or occupier of the Premises ". I assume they include these clauses to reduce the risks of the local and national tax authorities coming after Criterion. It sounds to me that they may be selectively enforcing the terms of the lease, but it obviously depends on the tenant's covenants in the specific lease.
When the phoenixing happens and a new company takes over operations, is Criterion varying the existing premises lease to switch the company name to the new one (in doing so, without good reason, it could be at risk of enabling tax evasion), or is it accepting payment from the new company in relation to the existing lease with the old company, when there is no contract between Criterion and the new company? Wouldn't a properly run landlord business want their actual tenant paying the rent, not some other company?
I can't help but wonder why the local authority and HMRC, given the debts are so large, are not going to the High Court to get a writ and sending enforcement officers in to take control of all the stock and shut the businesses down - they have the power to enter commercial premises and seize stock and cash. There may be good reasons they can't do that, including it being under Scottish law, and maybe the process is too slow to be effective or phoenixing gets around it, but it seems absurd that a shop can deliberately not pay rates or VAT and suffer no consequences, and worse than that, be expanding their dodgy tax avoiding business empire.
Great work, Jim.