Shops, care homes and cinema among buildings owned by firms based in offshore tax havens
DOZENS of Winchester properties worth more than £100 million are owned by firms based in offshore tax havens.
High street shops, restaurants, care homes, a health clinic and even a single parking space are owned by companies benefitting from low tax regimes overseas.
Burma Road student village, sold by the NHS for £3.4 million, is among more than 50 sites under offshore ownership in the district, according to data obtained by Private Eye magazine under freedom of information laws.
Well-known sites under foreign ownership include Everyman Cinema, WH Smith, Sunrise of Winchester care home and the Mercedes garage in Easton Lane, Winnall.
The data only includes assets bought between 2005 and July 2014, so the true scale of offshore ownership is likely to be far higher.
Although these companies are not breaking the law, their status may have helped them avoid millions of pounds in taxes.
Conservative city councillor Ian Tait, an affordable housing advocate and former banker, said: “Foreign investors have inflated the property market in Winchester.
“A lot of pressure on the Winchester property market is because people in London, very well-paid people, are being pushed out of London because they get more for their buck in Winchester.”
He added: “Winchester is just becoming unaffordable for most people. It’s completely transformed from what it was when I was growing up.”
Many assets are owned by Mike Willis, a tax exile and former car salesman at the city’s Peugeot garage who now owns huge swathes of property under the Struan Investments moniker.
Freeholds owned by Mr Willis include the cinema, a flat in Jewry Street and Iosis, an NHS dental clinic.
The Burma Road land, then part of Royal Hampshire County Hospital, was sold to Winchester Burma Ltd, a Guernsey-based subsidiary of F&C Commercial Property Trust, in 2012. The pension fund investor developed the flats for Winchester University students.
The smallest foreign-owned plot in the district is a single parking space in West End Close, off Romsey Road, bought for £30,000 in 2006.
The firms involved are largely based in Jersey and Guernsey but others are registered to the British Virgin Islands and the Turks and Caicos Islands. All besides Jersey appear on the EU’s tax haven blacklist.
Property and land outside the city boundary include the Holiday Inn on Alresford Road, Clarendon House in Shawford and hundreds of acres of lucrative farmland around Micheldever, South Wonston and Bishop’s Waltham. Swarraton Farm, north of Alresford, sold for £17.8 million in 2006.
