UNOCCUPIED, UNLOVED: LONDON MANSIONS LEFT TO CRUMBLE BY ELUSIVE OFFSHORE OWNERS

First published by: The Guardian

Council official despairs: 1 MILLION empty homes in London and across the UK

Empty property in Mayfair, London. There are 3,000 empty properties in Westminster, London, an increasing number of which are being squatted. "When I was a boy I used to come up to London and see houses like these and think 'Wow. Who lives there?'" says Paul Palmer, gazing up at a pair of seven-storey mansions in Park Lane across the road from Hyde Park. "Now I know – no one. These are owned by two different companies registered at the same address in the British Virgin Islands. 

They haven't been occupied for at least seven years, apart from when the squatters were there in January." There are an estimated 1m empty homes in the UK, and as empty properties officer for Westminster council, Palmer is responsible for about 3,000 of them. Every day, he visits some of the ritziest addresses in the capital and does his best to get them lived in again. What makes his job unique is the staggering value of the properties on his books: some of his Mayfair mansions are worth as much as £50m, even in their dilapidated state. What makes his job difficult is that many of the biggest and most expensive are owned not by dusty old dowagers down on their luck but by mystery investors hiding their identities behind offshore companies.

"I feel it is a tragedy," says Palmer. Many of these buildings have wonderful histories, and are part of our heritage. For them to be left vacant and unloved for a such a long time, pawns in a real-life game of Monopoly, is disgraceful." The properties usually aren't abandoned for reasons which might prompt sympathy. Palmer believes many elusive owners don't have the slightest intention of bringing them back to life. "So often offshore owners have little or no interest in the property as a building - it is merely an asset to be traded as they see fit," he says, adding that offshore firms are very tricky to track down.

Take the Park Lane townhouses, which Palmer estimates are worth £10m apiece. The key leaseholds on each are held by Konzeo Ltd and Weleta Ltd, two companies incorporated in the British Virgin Islands (BVI), a tax haven in the Caribbean. Both firms ignored multiple letters from Palmer asking them to explain why the buildings were unoccupied and threatening to issue a compulsory purchase order – until a gang of squatters, plus their dogs, moved in and were pictured on the front page of the Sun in January.

Builders appeared after the squatters were evicted, but Palmer says they were on site for only a few days and have never returned. "It's just the same situation as before," he says, peering through the letterbox nine months on, "only now they've left the lights on." Within a five-minute walk of Park Lane are 21 of the grandest properties on Palmer's list, worth between £6m and £50m each by his estimation. Of these, seven are registered to BVI companies, with others owned by firms incorporated in Jersey, Guernsey and Switzerland. 

Many are registered at the same address in Road Town in the BVI's capital of Tortola, just under different post office box numbers, says Palmer, who confesses he has often gazed at the satellite picture of Road Town on Google Maps and wondered what secrets lie beyond the satellite's range. John Samson, a property law expert at Taylor Wessing, says offshore-registered firms buy expensive London property as an investment, just like art or any other commodity. "One of the reasons that people buy property in London, and in particular Mayfair, is that there is almost always a demand for it," says Samson. "Investors believe the value will not only be maintained but will go up, regardless of whether it is lived in or not." Amanda Royce, a property solicitor, says Mayfair is a particularly attractive investment location for foreigners now because of the weak pound. 

"The owners leave them empty sometimes because they lose track of their properties. Often they have a place in New York, a place in Monte Carlo, one in the south of France and so on."In some cases where property is owned by offshore companies, UK capital gains tax will not be payable, says Samson. "If an investor with a British-registered firm bought a property for £1m one year and sold it the next for £2m, he would be liable for 18% capital gains tax on the £1m profit."

Upper Grosvenor Street in Mayfair ought to be one of the most desirable addresses in London. The heavily fortified American embassy occupies a square halfway down. Le Gavroche, with its two Michelin stars and Michel Roux Jr in the kitchen, is just around the corner and Hyde Park is at the end of the road. Yet four grand properties on the street have remained empty for up to eight years, abandoned and left to ruin by their offshore owners.

No 21, registered to Boss Holdings in Jersey and worth around £15m, has been vacant for at least eight years. So has No 18, which is believed to be owned by an Abu Dhabi prince who bought the property in June 2006 via a company registered in the British Virgin Islands. He has never lived there, but others have: the 30-plus rooms of the grade II-listed residence were squatted last November by a raggle-taggle of artists calling themselves the Da! Collective.

No 18 is registered to a firm called Deltaland Resources, which, according to property developer Mo Ghadami, is owned by Sheikh Sultan Bin Khalifa al Nahyan. When the Guardian contacted Deltaland's lawyer, Costa Keliris, at Maxwell Winward in London, asking whether the sheikh was the true owner, he did not respond. Whoever owns No 18 looks to have been shamed into actually developing the property. Last week, builders were on site, tut-tutting at the graffiti left by the squatters and sprucing up the building's crumbling exterior.

Down the street, the handsome twin townhouses at Nos 41 and 42 have both been empty for around five years. The leaseholds on both belong to BVI firms. One, Merix International, paid £25.85m for No 41 in 2007. Around the corner in Park Street are three more empty mansions, which Palmer says have not been occupied for up to eight years but are worth a total of £40m, even in their current sorry state. "Look at this one – it's massive!" he says, pointing to a monolithic red brick mansion opposite the Grosvenor House hotel. It has Sellotape across the top of the front door. "Aha," says Palmer. "The squatters have been scoping this one out. They do it to see if anyone is coming in or out."

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