Exclusive: The billionaire ‘mahjong prince’ forcing out Oxford Street’s HMV

Dear Londoners — When I was a reporter on the City desk at the Press Association in 2019, retail was having a tough time. We were on a first-name basis with partners at restructuring firms because we had to call them so often about administration processes, arrangements with creditors and closures of stores. Even then, one of the most memorable moments was the shuttering of HMV on Oxford Street.

The chain had gone bust over the Christmas break, but one morning in February we got the news that it had been bought up by Canadian record shop Sunrise Records (still its owners today). The new bosses immediately closed 27 locations, but the initial announcement didn’t come with a list of which ones were affected. My editor dispatched me to Oxford Street to investigate. There I found two rather dejected employees — who had still turned up for their shift — reading a notice on the door of the building, confirming it had closed. It seemed like an unbefitting end for the retailer’s presence on London’s most famous shopping street, so there was a real sense of triumph when it later reopened in the same location in 2023. 

Now though, that looks to have been only a brief return to glory, with the store once again closing down. Such a sudden reversal in fortunes, we decided, called for further investigation, so Andrew consulted his overseas ownership database and brings you the full story below.

Read on too for the government’s latest attempts to tackle loud phone noise on public transport, an update on our Old Street story and a glimpse into the chivalric world of Lime bike jousting. — Alys Key

We found the landlord that's forcing out Oxford Street's HMV

There was a lot of alarm when news broke last week that HMV was being forced out of its Oxford Street flagship store after the landlord’s decision to double the rent left the venue “commercially unviable”. It was a real blow for Oxford Street — the HMV had only returned to the iconic storefront at 363 Oxford Street where it was founded in 1921 three years ago, having previously left when the company went into administration and was taken over by new owners in 2019. In the intervening years, the store was taken over by Candy World — a dodgy candy store that had been raided by Westminster council for suspected tax evasion and selling counterfeit products. Its return to being occupied by a proper high street stalwart was seen as a rare victory in the fight against the shady shops that increasingly populate central London.

But in all the coverage of the recent decision and speculating about what it meant for the future of London’s high streets, we couldn’t find any articles explaining who actually owned the store in question. Who had taken the “frustrating” decision to increase the rent by so much as HMV managing director Phil Halliday put it? We decided to dig a little deeper.

Using a database of the overseas billionaire owners of London property (which we previously used to unveil how the sanctioned Libyan government were the landlords of a knock-off Oxford Street Harry Potter store), we were able to identify that as of January this year, 363 Oxford Street was owned by Glory Step Investment. The company, once registered in the tax haven of the British Virgin Islands, is now listed as being based out of a nondescript 1990s office block in Kowloon, Hong Kong — which sits above a shopping centre. The company bought the lease of the Oxford Street property in 2008, amid the financial crash, for a bargain £40m.