Three directors, forty-seven companies, one registered address in Doncaster

It started with a routine search. A user queried a company on CompanyPulse and the director network graph lit up in a way that made us look twice.

Three individuals - we'll call them Director A, Director B, and Director C - between them hold active appointments at 47 companies. All 47 companies share a single registered office address on a residential street in Doncaster. All 47 were incorporated through the same formation agent. And not one has filed accounts on time.

The pattern

The 47 companies were incorporated over a 14-month period between December 2024 and February 2026. They span a range of SIC codes: IT consultancy (62020), management consultancy (70229), wholesale trade (46900), and cleaning services (81210). The diversity of stated activities is a red flag in itself - why would the same three people operate in four unrelated sectors?

Each company was incorporated with identical articles of association and a single £1 share. None has filed a confirmation statement on time. Of the 12 oldest companies in the network (those incorporated before January 2025), all 12 have overdue accounts.

The CCJs

We cross-referenced the company numbers against the Register of Judgments, Orders and Fines. Twelve of the 47 companies have active County Court Judgments against them. The total value of CCJs across the network is £284,000. Individual judgments range from £2,100 to £47,000.

The creditors filing the CCJs are mostly trade suppliers and one commercial landlord. The pattern suggests the companies are being used to accumulate trade credit, default, and move activity to the next company in the network.

The formation agent

All 47 companies were incorporated through the same formation agent, a company that itself has 12,000+ formations on its books. The formation agent is registered in London but provides the Doncaster address as a "virtual office" service.

Formation agents are required under the Money Laundering Regulations 2017 to conduct customer due diligence. Whether adequate checks were performed on the three directors behind this network is a question for the agent and its supervisory body.

What can be done

Under the ECCT Act, Companies House now has powers to query information on the register and, where necessary, remove companies that appear to have been incorporated for fraudulent purposes. Patterns like this one - visible to anyone searching the public register - are exactly the kind of activity these new powers were designed to address.

As of publication, all 47 companies remain on the register and active. We'll update this article if that changes.