- [Nicole] Hello everyone. So, now we're going to look at a practical example of how to find the ultimate owners of the company, and we're going to use a company called The Banks Group, who communities have been resisting in the North of England for a long time due to their kind of open cast coal mining and the social and environmental impacts of that. And a group that has been supporting them are called Coal Action Network. And they asked for a little bit of help to double-check the company's accounts. And so I thought this would be a really good example to show you. Okay. So we go to the Companies House website, Find company information, and then Start now. Okay. So we've got the register here, ideally if you have the company number, you can put that in. Otherwise you can just write in the company's name. So I just know them as the Banks Group. So I'm going to see what comes up for that. Okay. And you can see there's really a lot of results, all different types of banks or banks group names. So you don't know the difference between them at the moment. So kind of need to go to the one that is, connected to the campaign. So they asked me to look at Banks Group Limited. So I'm going to look at them. All right. So then I'm going to go to Filing history and I'm going to see where their latest, full accounts are. So I can see them here but what you can also do is filter and just press Accounts. So full accounts made up to the 29th of September. So I'm going to view this PDF and often it just automatically downloads. I haven't seen it come up in another browser before but they're obviously doing that now. So just wait for it to load. But like I said it's really useful to download these documents, give them a good title and put them in your folder where you're building your company profile. All right. So Banks Group, development with care. So The Banks Group Limited. Okay, so we want to find the ultimate owners. So what we're going to do is we're going to just whiz down to notes to the financial statements. So that's page 12. So I'm going to go all the way down. Okay. Oh sorry. It's page 12 is here. Okay. So general information. The Banks Group is a limited company, limited by shares, blah, blah, blah. So I'm going to read through these notes and what I'm looking for is a note that tells me the ultimate owner. So, let's keep going. Director's remuneration, dividends. Okay. So, this is quite a useful page. This will show us who this company already own. So you can see some of the subsidiaries, and let's just keep going. Right. So point 23, right the back, ultimate parent company. So it says here, the company is a wholly owned subsidiary of BANKS GROUP HOLDINGS LIMITED, the ultimate holding company. Okay. So that's really useful. So we know that the parent of this company is BANKS GROUP HOLDINGS LIMITED. So I'm going to put that in our search BANKS GROUP HOLDINGS LIMITED. I find it's better if you don't put in the limited, when you're searching. So here we go, BANKS GROUP HOLDINGS LIMITED. So, what we're then going to do is we're going to while we're researching our companies we're always going to look at the accounts of the parent company, the ultimate owners. So I'm going to go to Filing history. I'm going to go to accounts and I'm going to view this 50-page PDF. And this is going to come up with the annual accounts from the BANKS GROUP HOLDINGS LIMITED. So we know now that those are the ultimate owners. So, all we had to go was to the notes, to the financial statement, and then down to the last page everyone puts in a different place. And while that's loading what I'm going to show you is here's one I made earlier. So I use some software called XMind which I think is free. I'm not sure anymore, but it's really useful tool for mapping out company ownership. So you can see this photo here or image that I made for the campaign. So we just looked at The Banks Group and then we found out their ultimate owners or the BANKS GROUP HOLDINGS LIMITED. But in those documents we could see all the subsidiaries of The Banks Group. So we could see there's, H.J. BANKS AND COMPANY the surface mining kind of wing. And within that, we can see they've got transport haulage, site leasing, they've got a holding company for their Banks WASTE LIMITED, and landfill site company. And they've got a whole bunch of dormant companies too. And then another subsidiary is BANKS DEVELOPMENTS LIMITED and this is our property division. So you can see these different limited companies here, BANKS PROPERTY LIMITED, who owns them. Bates Regeneration Limited. It's kind of at the bottom of the hierarchy. And then finally you can see, The Banks Group also own Banks Renewables and HJ Banks Construction. So this renewables wing. So, for a coal mining company, they're trying to show that they're being responsible or whatever but actually they own some wind farms. And so you can see the kind of little map of ownership here. So these holding companies and then Banks Group Limited, and then the ultimate owners that BANKS GROUP HOLDINGS LIMITED. And so the other useful thing is to know, how you're working out backwards. So say for example a campaign asked us to look into Banks Renewables. We would then look at their accounts and it would tell us that their owners were BANKS RENEWABLES LIMITED. And then we would look at their accounts. So this is all through the same Companies House process. And they will tell us that their owner is BANKS RENEWABLES LIMITED. And then we'd look at their accounts through Companies House. And they will hopefully say in their financial notes that the ultimate owner is The Banks Group, sorry, another owner is Banks Group Limited. And then we'd look at Banks Group Limited. And they would tell us that the ultimate owner is BANKS GROUP HOLDINGS LIMITED. So, hope I haven't confused you more but what I'm trying to communicate it's the same process every time with Companies House. You log into Companies House. You take a look at the company, you download the accounts and you look in the notes to the financial statements and it will tell you who the ultimate owners are. And if you're lucky, the kind of lower company, lower subsidiary, might even tell you its ultimate owner. Some it might say in these renewables accounts that the ultimate owner is BANKS GROUP HOLDINGS LIMITED. Every company is different. It can be a bit laborious but it's very useful to map out a company group.