| Comment | Again, I'm not making this up but basing this on what's been reported
The owner of the property is not setting up a fake business, the candy store is essentially a big franchise of dubious origins. The owner of the property, by having a tenant, is then not liable for business rates, as this falls to the tenant.
The key part is then that the candy store ownership is deliberately obfuscated so that the council is unable to find who is liable for the business rates and they go unpaid. The council tries to enforce their claim, but only uncover a nebulous set of foreign holding companies that never reply to anything. The staff working at these stores feign ignorance.
So it's avoidance on the part of the property owner, but evasion on the part of the tenant. And counterfeit candy is used because it's basically the quickest/easiest/cheapest way to set up a notionally legitimate operational business.
The reason that this is preferable to having paying businesses in that property is that you have to remember commercial landlords tend to have huge amounts of these business spaces, and witholding space from the market allows them to price gouge existing and prospective tenants, and overall profit by being able to maintain ever increasing rents on the properties they do let legitimately, whereas otherwise due to the failing high street their overall rent intake would decrease. |
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