In a bizarre turn of events that gives a new meaning to the term ‘shell company’, Westminster City Council officers are cracking down on fake snail farms.
The officers discovered multiple tubs of snails in otherwise empty London offices, and are now campaigning for legislation against other bogus farms.
But how on Earth are snail farms connected to tax avoidance in the first place?
Exploiting a tax loophole
Unscrupulous traders are attempting to avoid paying business rates by working around agricultural tax laws.
Such laws decree that agricultural buildings and fish farms are exempt from having to pay business rates on their premises.
This has led some to declare themselves as snail farms despite trading as entirely different businesses.
Why snails?
Agricultural sites and fish farms typically take up very large areas and would incur equally large business rates if they were liable for them. A business trading out of a small second-floor office in London, then, could hardly get away with telling authorities that they were operating a cattle farm.
Enter, the humble snail farm.
With far smaller premises needed, this gastronomical delight makes the perfect foil for such practices. There are already a handful of legitimate snail farms in the UK that produce snail meat and even snail caviar for the restaurant industry. Others specialising in supplying cosmetic and animal feed sectors operate from similar setups too.
These empty offices found with a dozen or so tubs of snails scattered about are a far cry from such professional operations, making it very easy to spot these bogus farms
How big is this problem?
This isn’t just a one-off find. Westminster City Council alone have identified fake snail farms. They’ve already had four of those liquidated and are currently working on the other two.
Adam Hug, Westminster City Council leader, commented that “this latest raid vividly illustrates an issue of business rates avoidance based on the ludicrous notion of snail farms which we have raised with central government before.
“In the last fortnight we have discovered more boxes of snails in empty office buildings in Westminster so there is little sign of this racket slowing up.
“As a local authority with limited resources, we enforce wherever we can. We will be on the trail of the snail racketeers or anyone else who thinks they can cheat the taxpayer.”
The council claims that they have missed out on around £375,000 due to bogus snail farms, and have suggested that commercial landlords may be complicit in these practices too.
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