On Sark in the Channel islands there have been 24 current and former UK company directors for every resident. Photograph: Universalimagesgroup/UIG via Getty Images
More than 175,000 UK-registered companies have used directors giving addresses in offshore jurisdictions, the Guardian has established. This raises fresh concerns about the scale of Britain's involvement in offshore secrecy arrangements.
Data obtained from the corporate information service Duedil reveals 177,020 companies have listed directors in jurisdictions such as the Channel Islands, British Virgin Islands, Cyprus, Dubai and the Seychelles.
More than 60,000 of those companies are listed as currently active on Companies House, the official register of UK businesses.
Having directors in offshore jurisdictions does not indicate a company is doing anything illegal, or that a director is necessarily a sham.
British expats who retain directorships of their business would feature in this data, as do "personal services companies" based in the Isle of Man, which help self-employed people incorporate themselves as a limited company.
However, the figures do reveal the huge scale of company registration relative to some of the islands' tiny populations: 47,161 companies have listed directors from the Isle of Man – representing one British company for every 1.8 residents of the island.
The figure is even more stark for the secrecy haven of the British Virgin Islands, where there is one director listed for every 1.3 residents of the islands, for a total of 17,959 UK businesses, past and present.
On the tiny Channel Island of Sark, there have been 24 current and former UK company directors for every resident of the island.
Many of the key figures involved in the "Sark Lark", as it was known, emigrated when the island's controversial practices came under scrutiny a decade ago. Most of those companies are now defunct, with only around 209 active directorships.
A Guardian/ICIJ investigation, published last November, documented the activities of more than two dozen "sham directors" – Britons each listed as directors of hundreds, and sometimes thousands, of companies registered across the world, allowing the real people behind them to stay in the shadows.
These sham directors held directorships not only in offshore companies but also in more than 8,900 British-registered companies – meaning UK authorities were left in the dark as to who was really in charge of supposedly British businesses.
These new findings suggest the numbers of such less-than-genuine directors on British company registers may be much greater than the 28 so far identified.
The Offshore Secrets investigation identified groups of nominee directors working out of territories scattered across the world. Atlas Corporate Services operated from Dubai and the Seychelles with six sham directors purportedly controlling more than 5,400 international companies.
Another pair of British expats, Sarah and Edward Petre-Mears, appeared to have a global empire of more than 2,250 directorships between them – run, initially, from their home in Sark, and then from a collection of addresses on the tiny Caribbean island of Nevis.
Writing in the Guardian in the wake of the initial findings, and before the latest figures came to light, the business secretary, Vince Cable, warned against the practice of using sham directors based in offshore territories. "[We] must identify and stop the minority who sail too close to the wind in order to protect the UK's reputation as a trusted place to do business," he said. "Becoming a company director carries with it legal responsibilities which, if breached, can result in disqualification, fines and prison.
"Some people think that putting up a straw man as a director makes them immune from the consequences. This is not the case: if you are acting as a director, you are liable."