Vanity Fair: "A Tale of Two Londons"

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"The really curious aspect of One Hyde Park can be appreciated only at night. Walk past the complex then, and you notice nearly every window is dark. As John Arlidge wrote in The Sunday Times:

“It’s dark. Not just a bit dark—darker, say, than the surrounding buildings—but black dark. Only the odd light is on. . . . Seems like nobody’s home.”

"That’s not because the apartments haven’t sold. London land-registry records say that 76 had been by January 2013 for a total of $2.7 billion—but, of these, only 12 were registered in the names of warm-blooded humans, including Christian Candy, in a sixth-floor penthouse. The remaining 64 are held in the names of unfamiliar corporations: three based in London; one, called One Unique L.L.C., in California; and one, Smooth E Co., in Thailand.

"The other 59—with such names as Giant Bloom International Limited, Rose of Sharon 7 Limited, and Stag Holdings Limited—belong to corporations registered in well-known offshore tax havens, such as the Cayman Islands, the British Virgin Islands, Liechtenstein, and the Isle of Man.

[Brent Cross's Hammerson has its employee share scheme administered from an off-shore tax haven. Hammerson has also jointly developed part of the Brent Cross Cricklewood redevelopment site with a company based in another off-shore tax haven. 

In addition, 'Clean Power Properties Ltd.', an off-shore tax-haven company, has stated its intention to build a waste incinerator at Brent Cross Cricklewood, in association with Network Rail. It might well have noticed the so-far-unbuilt Hammerson Brent Cross waste incinerator, for which Barnet council granted planning permission in 2009.

Just saying.]

"From this we can conclude at least two things with certainty about the tenants of One Hyde Park: they are extremely wealthy, and most of them don’t want you to know who they are and how they got their money."