Those seem like extremely non-negligible exemptions. Which is not to say that this law is useless, but it could use more teeth.
This law passed because 1. The regulator do not care about small guys; 2. They don't think small guys are moving that much money and are more trouble than profit; and 3. It looks like they are doing something. It also helps employ some people and maintain big cities real-estate by fake restaurants or shops. Ever wondered how some of these joints are able to pay rent and employees with so little customers?
I have always wondered about this. In Manhattan, for example, you fairly frequently hear about restaurants that seem to be popular and busy all the time closing because they couldn't keep up with rent increases. And yet it's also somehow full of corner stores, gift shops, laundromats, pizza places, Chinese restaurants, lunch buffets, etc. etc. that no one ever seems to go into and have 2 stars on Yelp, but are still there year after year.
I figured that in some cases it could be a family that owns the building or a sweetheart lease deal or whatever, but there are just so many that it doesn't seem to add up.
Exempting churches was a terrible, terrible mistake.
especially from a country with clear "separation of church and state" rules, except "in god we trust" on the money.
No surprise they granted the churches the exemption, and stronly agree they should NOT have gotten the exemption given their own well documented corruption.
They don't have any owners, so they can't disclose who their owners are.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2020/12/11/anonymou...
You could already sue the anonymous shell company if you wanted to.
It's convenient but it also generates a huge amount of telephone spam and fake invoices fraud attempts. So I could see the argument of keeping that information private.
I still think that it's better to have it public, but it generates some additional problems that needs to be handled.
The law is in practice fairly toothless, Companies House has typically insisted that it simply doesn't have the funding to pursue errors even though it's illegal to make false filings - despite a large volume of obviously bogus information in their system every year.
It did find the money exactly once in recent years, to prosecute one person. That one person was making a point of how toothless it is, by creating bogus data that was embarrassing to named politicians. What an excellent way to make their point for them.
There are actually three levels: A public address available to anybody who knows how to enquire, an address available to a large number of authorised users, including Credit Reference Agencies, numerous government agencies and so on, and finally a home address intended primarily for law enforcement (e.g. if the director is to be arrested it wouldn't do for police to have no idea where they live). You can set them all to be the same, but you don't have to.
The reason for the last extra grade is that in the UK there are businesses which are legal but broadly unpopular. For example, somebody is breeding animals that will be used for medical research. Historically protesters have harassed the directors of firms like that, vandalized their homes and cars, physically attacked them, or threatened their lives. Such directors are entitled to request that their home addresses be suppressed from most uses for this reason.
Edit for clarity: the tenants can't sue, being low income. My original post about suing anonymous shell companies was facetious.
> The information about the true owners would not be publicly available, however. FinCEN could release information only after receiving a proper request from a local, state, tribal or federal law enforcement agency, or a request by a foreign country. That means ownership information would not be publicly available to identify who is actually behind an investment.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/11/business/dealbook/llc-she...
> Tracing the beneficial owners of economically-active entities (i.e. not shell companies [2]) is expensive. Imagine doing this for Apple. You would need to look through every ETF that holds it to its mutual fund owners to their pension fund owners to their holding companies to their pensioners.
The could have done it so any one person can only have "shell" companies up to the point when x million is moved through them in any one given period.
Anyway, the decided this way and so it is.