I exposed a huge scandal under Andy Burnham's nose - it's barely believable

If Andy Burnham is really serious about cleaning up the British high street, he might want to start by taking a closer look at his own backyard. It turns out the North West heartlands that our current Prime Minister holds so dear are a hotspot for highly suspicious businesses. My latest investigation into the owners behind Britain’s high streets revealed that a vape shop in Burnham’s local area was prosecuted for selling to a child. Concerningly, the man fined for the offence has multiple corporate links on paper to individuals accused last year by the BBC of helping asylum seekers work illegally.

Most of you are probably thinking that finding these connections involved detailed undercover work or a leak from someone in the know. And while piecing it all together was a big job, the most critical information was sitting right there in plain sight. It all started with us doing some more digging into Britain’s ‘dodgiest town’, Accrington, Lancashire, which has a massive oversupply of vape and barber shops. When I visited earlier in the year, I encountered a raft of strange behaviour: shelves were suspiciously empty, and staff seemed genuinely surprised to see customers.

One of the oddest reactions was at 230 Union Road, where the owners literally pulled the shutters down when we arrived at 2pm on a weekday. The official records told an even more concerning story. Financial crime expert Ray Blake identified a series of “burner” companies that had been set up and then dissolved at that exact address. It was also listed as the official address for correspondence for Bryar Mohammed Zada. Zada was named in an undercover BBC investigation last year as someone who could allegedly be appointed as a "ghost director" for £400 a month—acting as a legal shield to absorb fines for illegal migrants.

That BBC exposé centred on a man called Kardos Mateen, who was secretly recorded promising to make arrangements to help asylum seekers run vape shops illegally. And 230 Union Road had a second link. Another of its registered directors, Karwan Jameel Saadoon, had taken over a business from Mateen in nearby Bolton. Both Saadoon and Zada held a staggering number of directorships for businesses across the country—so many, in fact, that Blake believed it was highly improbable they could be carrying out their official duties.

Zada had already been named in the BBC investigation, so I wanted to establish whether Saadoon actually controlled his companies. We visited five of the nine active businesses he was listed as directing. Two of these stores were in Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s own constituency, including a mini-market in his village where Saadoon was prosecuted for selling a vape to a child. However, when we visited the store, the current owner told me dismissively over the phone that Saadoon had sold the business.

Looking up this new owner’s Companies House records revealed a striking coincidence. On the exact day in August that Wigan Council publicly announced Saadoon’s fine, this new owner registered a near-identical company at the address in Burnham's village. Records show this same individual also established a second company that closely mirrored another business Saadoon operated in Manchester. On the ground, the standard tactic was evasion.

Staff in these shops often claimed not to speak English, denied knowing who their boss was, or insisted management were mysteriously on holiday. In a remarkable coincidence, nearly everyone we spoke to was newly employed, having worked there for just a couple of months. However, after my visits, a man claiming to be Saadoon contacted me. His explanations were full of contradictions. Initially, he told me he had taken a court penalty on someone else's behalf, claiming a ‘worker’ had actually sold the vape to the child.

Yet court records showed Saadoon himself was the one formally charged and convicted. We put it to him that this matched the pattern of a ghost director whose identity is used to absorb penalties. He firmly denied involvement in any fraudulent enterprise, claiming instead that he was a victim of identity theft. He said HMRC had flagged a phantom bank account opened in his name, and that he’d paid fines for driving penalty points he never committed.

He also claimed his business empire of mini-markets was legitimately funded by Home Office compensation, paid out after he was detained during two failed deportation attempts in 2012 and 2018. When asked about Kardos Mateen, his story shifted again. He first called him a "friend," but the moment he was asked about Mateen's alleged links to an immigration crime network, he backtracked—claiming he barely knew him, and then insisting he didn't even know his last name.

Remarkably, Saadoon then offered to bring this ‘Kardos’ to meet us in Bolton. But when we arrived for the pre-arranged meeting, and he saw our cameras, he fled. He later called us to admit the entire encounter was a deliberate ruse, and that none of the men he brought was who he’d claimed they were. It is staggering how much of this is hidden in plain sight. When a shop has bare shelves and evasive staff, you don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to guess something dodgy might be going on.

But this investigation shows that a quick look at corporate records often reveals a deeply suspicious paper trail. The question is why the Prime Minister isn’t doing more to tackle this. His newly announced measures to fix the high street—like scrapping the "Aim to Permit" rule and extending closure orders—rely almost entirely on granting new powers to local councils. That assumes local authorities have the resources and the willingness to shut these places down, which, given the financial state of local government, is rarely the case.

But worse than that, it fails to see the fundamental issue: the people exploiting our corporate loopholes and lax law enforcement don’t operate on a purely local level. Council officers can’t tackle nationwide networks playing shell games on Companies House. If Mr Burnham doesn’t realise that, perhaps he needs to take a walk down his own high street.