Dormant Volcanoes

I need to return to my previous article (What have Volcanoes, Grenada and St Vincent & the Grenadines got in common?) because there is more to add and I couldn’t resist that somewhat obvious title.

One of the things I didn’t cover in that article was the company secretary who acted alongside the wonderfully named Melissa Keisha Da Silva-Miller. And it was:

CSL Secretaries Limited was incorporated on 27 May 2002 so they’ve been around for quite a while.

Wait a minute! Am I not going to be included in this article?

You can be if you want.

Of course I want. I can’t have you getting all the attention.

But you are m…… oh never mind. Let’s just get on with it. CSL Secretaries Limited has some interesting history. For a start, in the past, it has had a nominee director and secretary called, respectively, Central Directors Limited and Central Secretaries Limited and it is these three companies I want to look at.

Why?

Because they all have the same shareholder, a chap called William Murphy, and they are all registered at the same address. According to Open Corporates (who maintain an archive of Companies House records as well as current ones – see https://opencorporates.com/) the three have held the following appointments:

CSL Secretaries Ltd                         740 (737 as secretary, 3 as director)

Central Directors Limited             4001 (3997 as director, 4 as secretary)

Central Secretaries Limited         3969 (3,964 as secretary, 5 as director)

Now that’s quite a large number of companies but given that they are company formation agents, I guess it’s not all that surprising.

That must be quite a lucrative business then?

Did you not take the hint from the title?

I thought it was a reference to dormant volcanoes?

I was attempting humour, word play, punning.

Ok, you don’t have to overdo it.

The fact is that CSL Secretaries Limited was incorporated on 27 May 2002 and Central Secretaries Limited, and Central Directors Limited were both incorporated on 8 May 2000. CSL Secretaries Limited filed a SIC Code of 74990 (non-trading company) and the other two filed SIC codes of 99999 (Dormant Company) and have only ever filed, for the combined 52 years of their existence, dormant accounts.

You’re telling me that these companies have created and acted as officers for around 4000 companies (assuming they acted in concert) and have never received a penny piece for them. Is that what non-trading or dormant means?

Well let’s check with what Companies House says on the subject shall we?

Yes, let’s.

I would have thought company creation fees count as significant, wouldn’t you?

Yes, and I can’t believe they’re doing it for nothing.

So what’s going on here?

I really don’t know but it doesn’t look right to me.

Do you think this whole subject is about to erupt?

Was that a volcano joke?

Might have been…