Ali Moulaye, Algorithms and a Lot of Unlikely Alignments

I love it when a (hidden) plan comes together

Do you ever have those “I wonder what would happen if…” moments?

I get them all the time and, mostly, move on before I can do anything about them but I had one a few weeks ago which intrigued me enough to investigate further.

My word it was worthwhile!

My inquisitive moment was triggered by a feeling that there was something about the various entities for which Mr. Moulaye signed off the accounts (and, yes, I know I’m obsessed with him but, to be fair, he has hugely increased my profile on LinkedIn so I think I owe him the fame in return).

The feeling was that there was some sort of common thread running through the names but I couldn’t quite put my finger on what it was.

So I jotted down a list of some of the Designated Members for which he signed, and it looked like this:

·        Holdstar   Evermax  Dexberg    Deltacom    Bondwest    Uniwell

·        Luxhold    Ecoport     Investmark     Norwell     Formond     Montbridge

The familiar signature appears again and again:

Looking at these business names I spotted a pattern. Did you?

Now, those that know me also know that, even if I am not on the Autistic Spectrum, I very definitely carry some of the traits. I am very sensitive to noise and touch, obsessive to a degree and have an extraordinary eye for small details and patterns. Like the fact that all modern lifts tend to “ding” once when they are going up and twice when they are going down. Have you noticed that? It’s very helpful if you are blind but most sighted people never even notice. But I do.

So what’s the pattern? They are all formed of two elements. So you could equally write them as:

·        Hold      star     Ever      max       Dex       berg      Delta    com

·        Bond    west      Uni        well      Lux        hold      Eco        port

·        Invest  mark      Nor       well       Form    ond        Mont    bridge

OK, there’s a couple of duplicates in there (two “wells” and two “holds”) but what immediately struck me was that, once broken down into these elements (or “bricks” as I’m going to call them), I could recognise that they were also regularly incorporated into a lot of the SLPs and LLPs that I have previously investigated.

Here’s a little exercise you can try yourself now. Choose any two of the bricks – perhaps ‘ever’ and ‘well’ or ‘west’ and ‘form’… you get the idea. Now put them together to form a new word. Then reverse them to make another. You’ll find they make words quite easily, not words that mean anything, but quite serviceable words, anyway. Sometimes they are (or sound like) the names of places (Montberg could be a skiing village, Portwell one of those nice Cornish coastal towns.) But most of the words you create will have no meaning at all. Add a generic business name after them (say Projects, Solutions, Networks, …) and you’ll have a business name that sounds entirely legitimate but communicates nothing at all about its activities or the nature of its business. I wanted to build a spreadsheet composed of all the ways of putting those 22 unique elements together in blocks of two (which for the number nerds amongst you means perming all combinations of two from 22 which equals 462 individual words) and then looked for entities containing those words.

Which was a great idea but slightly outside my comfort zone as an Excel user, so I called in my esteemed partner, Ray Blake (who is a wizard with Excel) to help. He rapidly built me a spreadsheet containing all the variations and I spent the next few weeks searching Companies House looking to see if there were any. I wasn’t disappointed.

In fact I was astonished!

Let me give you an example. Two of the elements are “lux” (from Luxhold) and “star” (from Holdstar) which can be combined to form both “Luxstar” and “Starlux” neither of which is a particularly common word (that’s a Graham joke, by the way).

Put them into Companies House however, and you discover the following entities:

·        Luxstar Group LP

·        Luxstar Holding LP

·        Luxstar Invest LP

·        Luxstar Projects LLP

·        Starlux Group LP

·        Starlux Grp LP

·        Starlux Int LP

·        Starlux Invest LP

·        Starlux Solutions LP

I don’t know about you, but I found that to be an enormous coincidence (or not).

By the end of my research I had found 360 LPs and LLPs which contained one or more elements of the 22 original “bricks” (for the nosy, geeky or just plain interested, the full list is published at the end of this article along with a link to the more detailed spreadsheet). The only manual adjustment I made was where there were two consecutive identical consonants (e.g. Bonddex) I removed one of them (to make Bondex).

But let’s be clear, that is just an astonishing number and has quite far reaching consequences. Allow me to explain why.

If you took, at random, the names of 12 separate designated members of LPs (technically they are General Partner ‘GP’ and Limited Partner ‘LP’ but you get my drift) or LLPs, broke them down into two separate elements, recombined them in all possibilities and then searched Companies House for the different combinations, statistically, the chances of finding a match are very low.

What happened here is that, out of 462 possible combinations, we have discovered 360 matches. Of course, some combinations yielded no results whilst others (as above) yielded a lot, but nevertheless this is massively indicative of the mechanical production of legal entity names.

Now, you might well be thinking, at this point, why not? Lots of Company Service Providers (CSPs) presumably act in the same way.

Which is fine, until you look at the spread over LPs and LLPs, all the different CSPs and addresses involved, the different signatories, General Partners, Limited Partners and Designated Members and you are forced to the conclusion that either this is the most monumental coincidence or, in some way or another, all these different firms at all these different addresses with all these different DMs, GPs and LPs and all these different signatories are acting in concert. And that ought to shock you. The only rational conclusion is that all these different elements are part of one cohesive, organised and centrally run group. It simply cannot be any other way. The (co)incidence of all these different combinations, all arising from just 12 names is too remarkable for words.

Let me just say that again. At the outset we started with just 12 offshore legal entity names. We recombined them and discovered in total 360 LPs and LLPs containing two combined elements taken from the 22 unique parts of those 12 names.

Altogether there are 68 different addresses recorded against the entire 360 entities although the top ten (given below) account for 228 of them. They are:

·        175 Darkes Lane, Potters Bar, Hertfordshire, EN6 1BW                                    35

·        78 Montgomery Street, Edinburgh, EH7 5JA                                                      28

·        Unit 5 Olympia Industrial Estate, Coburg Road, London, N22 6TZ                26

·        44 Main Street, Douglas, South Lanarkshire, ML11 0QW                                 25

·        1/2 35 Taits Lane, Dundee, DD2 1DZ                                                                 25

·        272 Bath Street, Glasgow, G2 4JR                                                                       22

·        The Studio, St Nicholas Close, Elstree, Hertfordshire, WD6 3EW                  21

·        145 Kilmarnock Road, Glasgow, G41 3JA                                                          20

·        45 Rosehaugh Road, Inverness, IV3 8SW                                                            14

·        Enterprise House, 82 Whitchurch Road, Cardiff, CF14 3LX                              12

Ray and I wondered what these hives of industry looked like. So we did what any twenty-first century geeks would and looked them up on Google Street View. Here they are, including the number of businesses on our list that live at each location:

There is little to indicate that some of these locations house active and profitable commercial enterprises, but why should there be? A registered office is often not a place of business; that often happens elsewhere and we can gain an insight into where that is and what actual business is done by looking at the accounts those companies file.

Of our 360 entities, 129 either never filed accounts or they had indecipherable signatures. Of the remaining 231, 69 were signed by Ali Moulaye (of course), 33 by S G Cox, and 11 each by Tiffany Nicole Brown and Sabine Boze/Vickers.

There is so much more that can be done with this spreadsheet. If you sort it by date, you will see patterns emerging of one LP being dissolved and a similarly title LLP being incorporated (or vice versa). You will see large numbers being incorporated or dissolved all on the same day. You will see how certain signatures are more associated with certain addresses (Ali Moulaye with Darkes Lane for example).

We have made the spreadsheet available for other people to download and interrogate, should they so desire.

It can be found at: https://www.dropbox.com/s/l1ryqtfzok77kmb/Moulaye%20constructions.xlsx?dl=0

Now, I must add that I have absolutely no evidence at all to suggest that any of the people or entities I have identified are involved in anything that could be described as criminal. Odd, yes. Hard to understand, certainly. But criminal? No, I can’t say that.

Should those who provide company formation services necessarily know what their clients are planning to do with the companies they set up for them? Well, that’s another question entirely.

And here’s the full list in all its “combination of elements” glory:

Astrolux LP

Astromark Systems LLP

Astrowest LP

Berg Commerce LLP

Berglux Import LP

Bergmark Universal LP

Bergmax Commerce LLP

Bergmont Sales LLP

Bergport LLP

Bond Market Development LP

Bondex Commercial LLP

Bondex Finance LP

Bondex Management LP

Bondex Products LP

Bondlux Projects LLP

Bondmark Universal LLP

Bondmax Inter LP

Bondmax Sales LLP

Bondwell Trans LP

Bondwest LLP

Bridgeform Resources LP

Bridgehold LP

Bridgemax Trade LLP

Bridgeport Industries LLP

Bridgeport Universal LP

Bridgestar Alliance LP

Bridgestar Sales LLP

Bridgestar Trading LLP

Comark Sales LLP

Comax Europe LP

Comax Group LP

Comax Projects LP

Comax Solutions LP

Comax Technics LLP

Comax Technics Trading LLP

Comax Technology LP

Comberg Import LLP

Comberg Industries LP

Comex Alliance LLP

Comex Industries LLP

Comex Transport LLP

Comform Sales LP

Comhill LLP

Comhill Trading LP

Comstar Networks LLP

Comwest Import LLP

Crossberg Capital LLP

Crossberg Resources LLP

Crossberg Track LLP

Crossform Trade LLP

Crosslux Management LLP

Crossmark Industries LLP

Crossmax Business LLP

Crossmax Trade LP

Crossport Express LLP

Delta Commercial Projects LP

Delta Commercial Services LLP

Delta Ecom LP

Delta Investment LP

Delta Investment Partnership LP

Delta System LP

Delta United LP

Delta Universal Holdings LP

Delta Universal LP

Deltacom Group LP

Deltaform Import LLP

Deltalux Import LP

Deltalux Import LP

Deltalux LLP

Deltamax Products LLP

Deltawest LP

Dexform Trade LP

Dexmark LLP

Dexmont Business LLP

Dexport Sales LP

Dexport Universal LLP

Dexwell Technology LLP

Eco Worldwide LP

Ecoinvest Group LP

Ecomark Products LLP

Econex Sales LLP

Ecoworld Alliance LLP

Everlux Fincare LLP

Everlux Partners LP

Everos Trade LLP

Everport Solutions LLP

Everstar Consulting LP

Everstar Experts LLP

Fine Commercial Services LP

Fine Marketing LP

Fineberg Solution LP

Finecord Industrial LP

Finecord Resources LP

Finecore Corporation LLP

Finelux LLP

Finelux Universal LLP

Finemax LLP

Finemax Ventures LLP

Finemont Development LP

Fineport Worldwide LLP

Finestar Industrial LLP

Formark Associates LLP

Formax Alliance LLP

Formax Trading LP

Formlux LP

Formont Development LLP

Formont Worldwide LP

Formost Promotions LP

Fundwell Investments LP

High Commercial Services LP

High Hill Solution LP

High Investments LP

High Market Management LLP

Highlux Commercial LLP

HIghlux Management LLP

Highmark Development LP

Highport Capital LLP

Highstar Export LLP

Highstar Management LP

Hill Market Management LLP

Hill West Development LP

Hillberg LLP

HIllberg Ventures LLP

Hillbond Networks LLP

Hillcom Networks LLP

Hillcom Trans LP

Hillmax Trade LP

Hillstar Complex LLP

Holdex LP

Holdex Sales LP

Holdexo Trade LP

Holdform Services LP

Holdwell Investments LP

Logocom LP

Logomax Development LLP

Logonex Universal LP

Logoport LLP

Logowest LP

Luxberg LLP

Luxmark LP

Luxmark Ventures LP

Luxnord Alliance LP

Luxnord Exports LP

Luxnord LP

Luxport LLP

Luxprime LLP

Luxstar Capital LLP

Luxstar Group LP

Luxstar Holding LP

Luxstar Invest LP

Luxstar Projects LLP

Luxwell Commerce LP

Luxwell Logistics LP

Luxwell Trade LP

Luxwest LP

Markberg Alliance LLP

Markberg Resources LP

Markwell Associates LP

Markwell Investments LP

Maxberg LLP

Maxbridge Industries LLP

Maxbridge Logistics LP

Maxcom Intertrade LP

Maxcom Management LP

Maxcom Organisation LP

Maxform Transport LP

Maxhill Sales LLP

Maxhill Services LLP

Maxhold LLP

Maxicom Alliance LLP

Maxicom Sales LP

Maxicom Trading LLP

Maxicon Invest LLP

Maxicon Sales LLP

Maxicorp Alliance LLP

Maxicorp Projects LP

Maxinvest Alliance LLP

Maxnord International LP

Maxwest Sales LLP

Maxwest Trade LP

Monoberg LP

Monoberg Sales LLP

Monoform LLP

Monolux Invest LP

Monostar Ventures LP

Monowest LLP

Monowest LP

Montberg Products LP

Montberg Sales LLP

Montberg Trading LLP

Montbridge LP

Monteco Alliance LLP

Montform Networks LP

Montin Trading LP

Montlane Commerce LLP

Montstar Transport LP

Montwest LLP

Multiform Associates LP

Multimax Transit LLP

Multimax Universal LLP

Multiport LLP

Multistar Capital LP

Multistar LP

Nexberg Impex LP

Nexmark Sales LLP

Nexmark Ventures LLP

Nexport Resources LLP

Nexport Ventures LP

Norberg Construction LP

Nordex Alliance LP

Nordex Business LP

Nordex Group LP

Nordex Holding LP

Nordex LP

Nordex Management LP

Nordex Solutions LP

Nordex Trade LP

Nordex Trast LP

Nordex Welt LP

Nordexa LP

Nordexo LP

Nordexport LLP

Normax Projects LLP

Normex Export LP

Normex Industrial LLP

Norwell Investments LP

Norwell Management LLP

Ostbond Capital LLP

Ostinvest LP

Ostmax Company LLP

Ost-west Trading Company LLP

Portbridge United LP

Portcom Technics LP

Porthill Trade LLP

Prime Commerce LP

Prime Investments Europe LP

Prime Investments Worldwide LP

Prime Marketing Services LP

Primecom Industrial LLP

Primecom Universal LP

Primeform Sales LLP

Primehold Management LLP

Primemax Trading LP

Primera Investments LP

Primestar Associates LP

Primestar Experts LP

Primestar Products LLP

Rainhill Trade LP

Rainport Import LP

Rondex LLP

Rondex Trade LP

Rondexon Marketing LLP

Ronhill Complex LLP

Ronlux Technology LLP

Ronwell Agency LLP

Scotlane Company LP

Scotmark Organisation LLP

Scotport Universal LLP

Star Investments LP

Star United LP

Star United Trade LP

Starberg Industrial LLP

Starberg Products LP

Starbridge Resources LLP

Starcom Mediavest LLP

Starcom Sales LLP

Starcom Trade LLP

Starcom Trading LP

Stareco LLP

Starfund LLP

Starhill Export LLP

Starkenburg LLP

Starlux Group LP

Starlux Grp LP

Starlux Int LP

Starlux Invest LP

Starmark Trade LLP

Starnex Trade LP

Starnord Alliance LP

Starnord LLP

Starport Alliance LP

Star-Uni Trade LLP

Starwell Invest LLP

Starwell Projects LP

Starwell Systems LLP

Starwell Technology LP

Starwest Systems LP

Uni Ecom LLP

Uniberger LLP

Unico Enterprises LP

Unico Holdings LP

Unico Systems LP

Unicom Alliance LLP

Unicom International LLP

Unicom International LP

Unicom Trade LLP

Unicom Trading LLP

Uniform Export LP

Uniform Services LLP

Unihold LP

Uniholding Group LP

Unilux LP

Unimax Capital LLP

Unimax Communications LP

Unimax LP

Unimax Properties LP

Unimax Transit LP

Unistar Commerce LP

Unistar LP

Unistar Networks LP

Uniwest Export LP

Uniwest LP

Wellform Solutions LLP

Wellmark Services LP

Wellmax Projects LP

Wellmont Impex LLP

Wellport Industrial LLP

West Holding LP

West Invest Corporation LLP

West Investments LP

West Marketing Intertrade LP

West Systems LP

Westberg Impex LLP

Westbridge Advice Services LP

Westcom IT Services LP

Westhill Universal LP

Westhold Alliance LLP

Westhold LLP

Westhold LP

Westlane Capital LP

Westlux Capital LLP

Westlux LP

Westmark Alliance LP

Westmark Business Services LP

Westmark Intertrade LLP

Westmark LP

Westmax Capital LLP

Westmax LP

Westport Agency LP

Westport Alliance Corp LP

Westport Commercial LP

Westport Enterprises LP

Westport Europe LP

Westport International LP

Westron Capital LP

Westron Development LP

Westron Sales LLP

Weststar Partnership LP

Westworld Corporate Services LP

Westworld Developments LP

Westworld Enterprises LP

Westworld Import/Export LP

Westworld Systems LP

World Marketing LP

Worldberg Transit LLP

Worldcom Industrial LP

Worldcom LP

Worldmark Impex LP