Trump’s UK Company Holdings – And Concerns About Companies House Director Name Authority Files

A couple of days ago I had the briefest of looks at Companies House data to see what the extent of Trump’s declared (current) corporate roles are in the UK. Not many, it seems. Of the companies with which Trump has a declared officer interest, the list of co-directed companies in his UK empire seems small:

(u’NITTO WORLD CO., LIMITED’, u’SLC TURNBERRY LIMITED’, 2 common directors)
(u’TRUMP INTERNATIONAL GOLF CLUB SCOTLAND LIMITED’, u’DT CONNECT EUROPE LIMITED’, 3 common directors)

In my code as it currently stands, two directors are the same if they have the same director number according to Companies House records (I think! Need to check… can’t remember if I also added a fuzzy match…).

Unfortunately, Companies House has issues with name authority files (they need to talk to the librarians who’ve been grappling with the question of whether two people with the same, or almost the same, name are actually the same person for ages… “VIAF” is a good keyword to start on…). For example, I strongly suspect these are the same person, given that I found them by mining co-directed companies seeded on two separate Trump companies:

(u’qcmgW-bhHd3TT1MSNuqHIjWBxLI’, 1946, u’TRUMP, Donald J’)
(u’8WlV7G8p1ojhFks_i4ljYwW5WvI’, 1946, u’TRUMP, Donald John’)
(u’65Cc7HAVpXHqcLR_-CczJ80C724′, 1946, u’TRUMP, Donald’)

Or how about:

(u’sj7c-OeX84Ww_JJudaY_D-DZDm4′, 1981, u’TRUMP, Ivanka’)
(u’omdexC3tGVn8JnozQ9ZazJL_MT8′, 1981, u’TRUMP, Ivanka’)
(u’PCrNv-j3ABqrisHsT_PKL3yAlc0′, 1981, u’TRUMP, Ivanka’)

FWIW, Companies House seem to be increasingly of the opinion that month and year discriminators on birthday are plenty, and day doesn’t need to be publicly shared any more (if, indeed, it will still be collected). Occasional name/month/year collisions aside, this may be true (if you’re happy to accept the collisions). But until they sort their authority files out, and use a common director ID (reconcilable to a Person of Significant Control identifier from the PSC register) for the same person, they should be providing as much info as possible to help the rest of us reconcile director identifiers from their inconsistent data.

PS I started to doubt myself that Companies House at least attempts to use the same identifier for the same person, but here’s another example that I’m pretty sure refer to the same person… – note the first result associates 35 appointments with the name:

If you click the top link, you’ll see the appointment dates to the various companies are different, so it’s presumably not as if the commonality arises from the appointments all being declared on the same form. I’m not sure how Companies House reconciles directors, actually? Anyone know (let me know via the comments if you do…). For now, I assume it to be something like a (case insensitive?) exact string match on name, birthdate, and maybe correspondence address (or at least, a recognisable part of it)?

The following records, this time from Formula One co-directed companies, presumably relate to the same person (an accountant…):

(u’keWSNSl6V3Zg2FNV7vPy6BBVPVw’, 1968, u’LLOWARCH, Duncan Francis’)
(u’dzIMC8ot_A9rJThNdKQ5yQC-M3Y’, 1968, u’LLOWARCH, Duncan Francis’)
(u’m5FeeEsclwF0s57UkL2NcB6MIBk’, None, u’LLOWARCH, Duncan’)
(u’S9zuBVuv1LXtbR62_r-x9RzJzRE’, None, u’LLOWARCH, Duncan’)
(u’BTfAza-kduWKPnuUYPDd3w2i9fc’, None, u’LLOWARCH, Duncan’)
(u’3e8laCMUijwG6FdTnqGcDqMsXr4′, None, u’LLOWARCH, Duncan’)
(u’1Qgz-VCSMqjZZgyaibcvBAyGKUU’, None, u’LLOWARCH, Duncan’)