https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/ I came across the above earlier, and out of curiosity did a few searches on hedge funds. The audited financial statements are available publicly, and I was surprised when reading through some of the results. Just fyi, in case anyone else is curious about the revenue and cash flows behind the business entities.
I work in a UK based hedge fund. A few points about UK financial statements at companies house: - They have to be audited so you can be fairly sure they are real and accurate. - A lot of management companies are setup as a LLP and have 1 corporate member which sometimes invoice the LLP for services. The corporate member then pays the salaries etc. and the Net Profit is only going to be the profit actually shared among the partners (excludes office cost, salaries, bonuses, etc.) - You can have a second company in a lower tax jurisdiction (typically luxembourg) which invoices intellectual property fees. The owners of both the Lux and UK companies are the same, but luxembourg doesn't have an open companies house and this will be reflected as a loss on the UK accounts, so again, be careful when looking at *net* profit. - Most hedge funds have a sister company located in a 0%-taxed environment. This is due to the structure of pooled vehicles (funds), they need either a General Partner (in Caymans) or a ManCo (in Luxembourg) which takes the regulatory risk and clients legal risk on its balance sheet. If a fund charges 2% / 20%, it is in the fund manager's best interest to only charge 1% / 10% from the UK company and 1% / 10% from the cayman or lux company. Typically they will keep most of the management fee off-shore and the performance fees on-shore as in a lot of cases they can be considered as carried-interest (not in the UK tho!) and not as income, lowering income tax considerably. - You can do the same with distribution companies. UK-based firms could get 1% / 10% while its US-based "distribution" company gets 1% / 10%. Since US corporate taxes are much higher than UK's, this makes no sense tax-wise, but replace US with Hong Kong or Singapore and you see the point. A typical UK / Luxembourg structure will have the partners of the fund company pay about 7% of taxes, much less than the 50% or whatever the "fair share" is expected to be these days. Conclusion: most of the flows you will not see. This is changing with time due to EU pressure, but it is still widely used and Brexit will probably help these tax shortcuts in the UK.