It’s not cheap to buy secrecy, not by ordinary standards. If you set up a company offshore, it will cost you hundreds of pounds – a British Virgin Islands vehicle is more like £1,000 – and if you use that company to own UK property, you’ll be liable for a special “enveloped dwellings” tax of up to £226,950 a year. However, if you don’t mind paying those fees, the secrecy you’ve bought is world class.

In this way, it’s easy for the rich and the powerful to hide their wealth behind shell companies, and thus buy protection from public scrutiny. In this way money-laundering operations are allowed to undermine the foundations of Western stability. In order to stop this happening, I think we should give them anonymity free.

The latest Government spreadsheet reveals that there are 96,693 properties owned by offshore companies in England and Wales, held everywhere from Abu Dhabi (five properties) and Alderney (44 properties) to Wyoming (19 properties) and Zimbabwe (three properties). The most favoured jurisdictions are of course the tax havens that everyone knows about – Panama, Switzerland, the Seychelles, Jersey, Luxembourg and the rest of them – but dozens of less likely countries appear on the list too.