Over the past two years they have appeared like magic across London’s best-known shopping streets.
A string of Harry Potter-themed stores now enjoy a flourishing trade on sites including the Strand, Whitehall, Piccadilly Circus and Oxford Street.
Although unaffiliated with Warner Bros – or J.K. Rowling – the garish shops often sell a range of genuine merchandise from the bestselling books and Hollywood film franchise they inspired.
Elaborately decorated with props from the books and movies – one even including a replica of the flying Ford Anglia famously crashed by Harry and his best friend Ron Weasley – they attract streams of tourists and fans who flock to the capital each year eager to spend their cash on Hogwarts-themed paraphernalia.
But, while it’s clearly a wizard idea to use one of Britain’s best-loved fictional characters to attract business in the nation’s most famous shopping areas, worrying questions have emerged about who is behind some of these stores.
The Mail has discovered that many of the new Harry Potter-themed shops are the latest incarnation of a murky retail network that also includes American candy stores and tacky tourist souvenir shops.
Proliferating on central London’s busiest streets, these stores are accused of peddling at times illegal or unsafe goods and using shell companies and patsy directors to avoid tax.
From a painstaking trawl of public records, we pieced together a network of at least nine Indian nationals who – on paper at least – control an ever-changing series of 30 companies through which this retail empire is run.
Despite being unaffiliated with Warner Bros or J.K. Rowling, the shops – such as this store in London – often sell a range of genuine merchandise
The shops attract streams of tourists, but many of these outlets are the latest incarnation of a murky retail network that also includes American candy stores
These firms, all set up in the past few years, regularly exchange directors and have changed location between 21 addresses in London and Oxford. A third of the companies have been struck off, wound up or dissolved, often owing debts – including four related companies which owe £400,000 to Westminster City Council.
Of those firms which are still running, many have either not filed accounts or have large debts wiping out nearly all profits.
Most of the directors are registered at – but don’t appear to reside in – a string of overlapping dilapidated homes in Oxford.
Even the spelling used in some of these companies appears slapdash – with names entered on the official Government register including ‘Whitehal’ (sic) and ‘Souvneirs’ (sic).
The shadowy network currently centres on a semi-detached house in Botley on the outskirts of Oxford, which according to Companies House is the listed address of mother-of-two Safoora Shafeeq and her husband Shafeeq Pallivalappil.
Between them, the couple are directors of 11 retail companies, five of which have previous addresses linked to current Harry Potter shops. Little is known about the pair, who are believed to have moved to Oxford in 2020 from the Indian state of Kerala. Mr Pallivalappil is reported to have described on his Facebook account – which now appears to have vanished – how, after first arriving in the UK, they worked several jobs and put in extra hours ‘on public holidays and weekends, without any extra payment’ to get by.
When they were approached by the London Centric news website at the rented property late last year, Ms Shafeeq initially denied owning the Harry Potter stores and said she was just ‘running’ them, yet in a later email to the publication denied having said this. After speaking to the reporter, the couple’s firms were abruptly re-registered to a service address in Liverpool but, in the following weeks, many were re-registered again to the Oxford address.
Two of the companies controlled by the couple are among four registered firms that together owe business rates on a Harry Potter store near Piccadilly Circus totalling £400,000 to Westminster City Council.
Mother-of-two Safoora Shafeeq and her husband Shafeeq Pallivalappil are the directors of 11 retail companies, five of which are linked to current Harry Potter shops
Another garish store located on the Strand in London
The couple told London Centric that previous legal operators are responsible for these unpaid rates and that they were ‘awaiting the updated bill to make payments accordingly’, and were ‘strictly adhering to all legal requirements’. But, despite on paper being a major nerve centre of the British retail sector, the Oxford property the couple were living at now appears to be empty.
When the Mail visited last week, flyers and freesheets littered the porch, the blinds were drawn upstairs and downstairs, and neighbours said they hadn’t seen anyone at the address for weeks. Nobody knew where they had gone.
Similar uncertainty surrounds how the couple came to take control of these companies, many of which had previously been listed at other addresses and run by different directors linked to a string of separate stores in high-profile London locations.
The exact connection between these people is unknown, but the Mail found they were all originally Indian nationals and many have been listed at the same residential Oxford addresses.
Mr Pallivalappil was previously listed at an address, along with two other directors in the network, a 20-minute drive away at a rental flat in the Oxford suburb of Marston.
Despite the names having appeared on the electoral roll or the Companies House register at different times over the past five years, the letting agent said none of them had rented the property in the past decade. It was a similar story at a new-build apartment around the corner where Mr Pallivalappil was previously on the electoral roll and five other directors in the network are listed.
When the Mail paid a visit, three students there said they had been renting the flat since October and had never heard of the directors registered at the property.
Another question surrounds how much this complex network of directors are actively involved in running – and profiting – from the shops. Only one of the Harry Potter shops, Wizards & Wonders at Piccadilly Circus, has a website, but it does not offer any names for those behind it. Indeed, in an apparent moment of self-awareness, it describes itself as ‘shrouded in mystery’.
Products for sale online (although the link breaks when you try to make a purchase) include a gold-plated Hermione Time Turner necklace for £59.99, a Hufflepuff hanging banner for £15.99 and a chocolate wand for £13.99. A ‘plush toy’ of Dumbledore’s bird Fawkes can be yours for £23.99. Elsewhere, it says it is run as a franchise. The contact email is a Wizards & Wonders Gmail account and its Instagram page has been removed.
It is believed that Harry Potter merchandise can be sold at outlets other than official Harry Potter stores as long as it is properly sourced.
Those with knowledge of the operations suggest that most of the official directors listed as controlling the shops are in fact just ‘patsies’, who are put in charge of shell companies for a small fee but see none of the real money being made by these enterprises.
Some, they explain, are believed to be foreign students happy to sign the legal paperwork and have their names on the publicly-available Companies House register for a bit of pocket money while the real owners profiting from the enterprise stay in shadows behind a legal cloak of invisibility. They say that the Harry Potter stores are the latest manifestation of a long-running problem plaguing central London’s famous shopping districts.
For years there was an issue with souvenir shops selling over-priced goods around Oxford Street that used shadowy networks to try to avoid taxes.
This problem exploded during the pandemic when many legitimate shops went out of business and their spaces were quickly filled with a series of American candy stores which became notorious for expensive tat, not paying taxes and, in some cases, selling dodgy products including counterfeit chocolate, watches and vapes.
During a raid on one of the American candy stores on Oxford Street in September 2024, Westminster City Council seized 600 items including fizzy drinks, sweets and cereals not properly labelled or suspected of containing harmful ingredients.
Many commercial landlords were nevertheless happy to lease to them because leaving the plots empty would make them liable for paying the store’s business rates.
Although there is no evidence of unsafe products being sold in the Harry Potter stores, they appear to be run on a similar business model – and at least one Harry Potter store is a direct descendent of one of the candy stores. Meanwhile, some of the shops in the extended network of directors connected to the wizard stores remain American sweet stores, souvenir stores or an Aladdin’s-cave style mishmash offering vapes, luggage and money exchange – as well as corners selling Harry Potter merchandise.
A large proportion of these – though not those specifically themed as Harry Potter stores – were not charging VAT.
This may explain one reason for the constantly revolving companies the shops use, as they can avoid paying the tax if their revenue is under £90,000 per year.
The other reason is to make it far harder to track down those behind the stores when companies are wound up still owing business rates, as has happened in several cases. Exasperated council officers trying to recoup the cash keep having to start again every time the official names change.
As well as the dodgy goods and unpaid taxes, the optics are also bad. Oxford Street may once have been steeped in history and culture but now, for many tourists to London, its tawdry souvenir and luggage shops will form their impression of the capital and the country – hardly the images the UK wants to project to the world.
No wonder, then, that Westminster City Council has been waging a battle against these shops blighting our once venerated shopping district.
Council leader Adam Hug says: ‘For the past two years, the council has exposed the fact that unscrupulous traders have used a byzantine structure of shell companies, patsy directors and lax Company House rules to set up shop in high-profile locations and then disappear.
‘While the number of US candy stores has fallen in the West End, it remains a fact that this kind of tawdry tat – whether over-priced candy, lookalike wizard regalia and illegally strong vapes – is not the kind of look we want to see on our streets. The council will continue to pursue owners for unpaid business rates and seize suspected illegal or unsafe goods from these stores.’
He congratulated the Mail for its investigation. His officers deserve praise, too, for taking the fight to the rogue stores. But, with those behind them going to such lengths to avoid detection, it seems it would need one of Harry’s magic wands to make the problems facing Britain’s iconic shopping streets vanish.
