Investigating who is behind the firm Offa

One of the benefits of the UK legal environment is that you can find out a fair amount about a business, especially one engaged in financial services, from public registries which are easy to access with the benefit of the internet. Life really is much easier than 40 years ago!

I illustrated this in my March column for the magazine "Islamic Finance News" when I encountered an organisation that I had not heard of before, called Offa. You can read it below.

A first look at the UK firm Offa

My starting point with any document is wanting to know who is behind it. Although I have known Offa’s Executive Chairman Sultan Choudhury OBE for over 20 years (he used to be CEO of Islamic Bank of Britain) I was unfamiliar with Offa itself.

Accordingly, I spent some time tracking down their legal status. Fortunately, the UK has strong disclosure requirements for business websites. I have reproduced Offa’s website footer, slightly abridged:

I then downloaded Offa Money’s 2024 accounts from the UK’s Companies House and was surprised to see that it is a dormant company, with just £100 of share capital.

The FCA website details Offa Money’s permitted activities, which include approving financial promotions and several relating to home purchase plans, namely:

home purchase plans respectively. However, since the company has no income and no expenses, I assume that all the home purchase plans activities take place in other companies, with Offa Money providing the necessary regulatory cover.

The 2024 accounts of Offa Operations did however show activity. It has accumulated losses of GBP 3.1 million, with negative equity of a similar amount. It is financed by loans from group undertakings. The accounts state that the financial statements are consolidated by OFFA Group Holding Ltd. (Small typographical error.)

The 2024 Offa Group Holdings account are much more substantial, with share capital plus share premium of GBP 2.5 million. However, there are significant accumulated losses of GBP 2.9 million, resulting in negative equity of GBP 420,000. These accounts report that the company is controlled by GII Holding LLC of the UAE. That company is clearly part of Gulf Islamic Investments LLC which prefers to use the abbreviation “GII” almost everywhere on its website.

As expected, the Companies Houses register for Offa Group Holdings shows GII Holding LLC as a person with significant control, owning more than 50% but less than 75% of shares and voting rights. It also reports Mazarine Partners Ltd as a person with significant control, owning more than 25% but less than 50% of shares and voting rights.

In turn, the Mazarine Partners Companies House entry shows that Sultan Choudhury is a director, and it reports three other companies as persons with significant control, each owning more than 25% but less than 50% of shares and voting rights of Mazarine Partners. At this point I stopped researching!

Based on the above, I deduce that Offa is arranging home purchase plans, with the funding coming from the UAE via the GII ownership chain. The key message is that in the UK it is feasible to find out who you are dealing with, but it does require familiarity with the research process. I suspect that most customers don’t do that.

Mohammed Amin is an Islamic finance consultant and former tax partner at PwC in the UK.