Who really owns London's pubs?

A tree's roots can be three times larger than its branches. It's the same in London: you look at a building or a shop and think, 'It's a series of bricks, someone's selling things.' But maybe that's not all there is to it. Behind the building, there are financial relationships that sometimes stretch thousands of miles, a mirror world of complex heritage structures that no one notices—unless they bother to dig deeper and annoy people who are just trying to enjoy a drink.

That's what I did recently on a London pub crawl. These establishments look like London pubs , but – like tens of thousands of London properties – they are primarily an investment for the companies in the British Virgin Islands, the Cayman Islands, the Isle of Man, Luxembourg, and Jersey that own them.

And they care little for the actual activity of the place or the people in it. The pub was once a fundamental element of our national character. “Personally, I would like to be in a tavern in London,” exclaims a page dreaming of a pot of ale and safety during the Siege of Harfleur in Shakespeare’s Henry V. But a quarter of our pubs have closed since 2000. And London’s taverns now offer a different kind of liquid: they are a place to store wealth, a cover for international capital circulating discreetly.

We begin in a pub that is geographically and culturally central to British political life: The Two Chairmen in Westminster. This is where members of the Treasury gather for a pint after the budget is passed. It's where Nigel Farage launched his fag-and-pint political identity during a drunken interview with the Telegraph in 2007. It's home to political advisers, lobbyists, think-tank weirdos, and the occasional MP. It's a short walk from the offices of Prospect , The Spectator , and UnHerd media outlets.

Ironically, given the number of Brexit supporters who used to hang out there, The Two Chairmen was sold to foreigners on June 24, 2016, the day after the UK decided to leave the EU. Magnus Property, which bought the pub for a whopping £13.5 million, is an offshore company registered in the Isle of Man (a self-governing territory separate from the UK, even though King Charles is the monarch). It shares its address—on the first floor of a small office building overlooking the harbor in Douglas, the island's capital—with 180 other companies, so presumably it exists virtually only on paper.

When the Chairmen were sold in 2016, it was possible to find out who the new owner was, namely Magnus (pay £7 to the Land Registry and you can find out who owns any building), but it was impossible to find out who owned Magnus.

Offshore companies have long been used to discreetly purchase expensive properties while avoiding taxes. For example, if a former Prime Minister and his wife [in this case Tony and Cherie Blair] walk into a real estate agent's office and buy a £6.5 million house,