"No beneficial owners have been identified"

The United Kingdom created the Register of Overseas Entities in 2022 for one purpose: to make foreign companies holding British property say who actually owns them. It was the legislative answer to a decade of complaints that nobody could see through the structures.

Serinus Energy plc is on it, under number OE032588. Here is what it says.

Zero

Active beneficial owners: 0.

Two active statements sit in their place. The first, notified on 21 April 2025, reads in full: “No beneficial owners have been identified.” The second, the same day: “Nobody has become or ceased to be a beneficial owner during the update period.” A third, worded identically to the first, is marked Withdrawn.

One managing officer is listed. Jeffrey Auld, born June 1966, correspondence address 32 Greswell Street, London, responsibilities recorded as CEO, notified 22 April 2024.

That is the entire disclosed human content of the entry.

What that does and does not mean

It is not, on its own, evidence of concealment, and this archive will not pretend otherwise.

The threshold for a registrable beneficial owner is broadly a holding above 25 per cent, or equivalent control. A company whose shares are widely held — as a listed company’s generally are — can legitimately have nobody who meets it, and filing that statement is the correct thing to do. Serinus was listed on AIM and in Warsaw.

So the statement is very probably accurate and entirely ordinary.

Why it is on the file

Because of what it does to a reader trying to check something.

A profile says: former non-executive director, Serinus Energy plc. The reader goes to the only UK register that covers the company and finds one officer, who is a different man, and a formal declaration that ownership cannot be identified. There is nothing there to confirm the claim, and nothing there to refute it.

That is the recurring shape of this file. Of twenty-seven entities associated with Madnani, two are confirmed by a statutory register — Aurelian Oil & Gas and Kulczyk Investments. The rest rest on his own account of them.

Again: unverifiable is not untrue. Singapore, the Emirates and Liechtenstein do not open their officer registers, and advisory seats are filed nowhere. But a reader is entitled to know which of the twenty-seven they can check, and the answer is two.