Ugland House

A five-storey beige office block on South Church Street that became, in the 2000s, the global symbol of offshore banking. The building is the registered address of more than 40,000 corporations — most of them shell companies set up by international clients of the Maples Group law firm that owns it — and is regularly cited in books and documentaries on tax avoidance.

You cannot go inside. The interesting part is the address itself: stand on the pavement, take a photo of the small plaque by the door reading "Maples and Calder", and consider that the world's biggest concentration of corporations by area is a building you could throw a stone across.

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A story
Barack Obama, then a senator, told an audience in 2008 that Ugland House — a modest five-storey office building at 121 South Church Street — was either the world's largest building or the world's largest tax scam, because more than 18,000 corporations claimed it as their registered address. The building, and the law firm Maples Group that runs it, remain in business; the number is now closer to 40,000.

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