A Kurdish crime network is enabling migrants to work illegally in mini-marts on High Streets the length of Britain, a BBC investigation can reveal.

The fake company directors are paid to put their names to official paperwork, and have dozens of businesses listed on Companies House, but are not involved in running them.

Two undercover reporters, themselves Kurdish, posed as asylum seekers and were told how easy it would be for them to take over and run a shop and make big profits selling illegal vapes and cigarettes.

We have linked more than 100 mini-marts, barbershops and car washes, operating from Dundee to south Devon, to the crime network. But a financial crime investigator told the BBC he believes it goes much wider.

The Home Office said it will investigate the BBC’s findings.

Reacting to our investigation, Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood, said: “Illegal working and linked organised criminality creates an incentive for people to come here illegally. We will not stand for it.”

For the first time, we can reveal the inner workings of a criminal system that lets asylum seekers work in plain sight on UK High Streets, in mini-marts that mainly profit from illegal cigarettes and vapes.

One man told us weekly takings from illicit tobacco at his shop could be “sometimes, up to £3,000”.

The men who facilitate it all – so-called “ghost directors” – each have dozens of businesses listed on Companies House but in many cases are not involved in running them.

“The shop doesn’t belong to me, it’s just under my name,” one of them told our undercover reporters.

Many of the businesses are dissolved after about a year, and then re-opened with small changes to official paperwork.

These businesses have “all the red flags” associated with organised criminality, a financial crime investigator told the BBC.

During our investigation we found:

• An asylum seeker, who says his claim was rejected, trying to sell a shop to our undercover reporter for £18,000
• A Kurdish Facebook group listing dozens of mini-marts, barbers, car washes and takeaways for sale
• “Ghost directors” charging illegal workers up to £300 per month to register mini-marts in their names
• Kurdish builders offering to build elaborate hiding spaces for illegal cigarettes and vapes that would fool sniffer dogs
• Asylum seekers, who said the Home Office had left them in legal limbo, working 14-hour shifts in mini-marts for as little as £4 per hour

The two Kurdish journalists involved in our investigation know that tensions over immigration are high. They worry that such coverage of illegal activities within the Kurdish community could inflame hostilities.

One of them is a former asylum seeker himself, and says “I wanted to play a role in uncovering these illegal activities […] to say loudly that they don’t represent us.”

Over four months, we monitored a Kurdish Facebook group where businesses across the UK were listed for sale.

New adverts popped up every week.

The reporters got in touch with three people who listed mini-marts for sale in Crewe, Hull and Liverpool. They said they were interested in running a mini-mart and trading illegal cigarettes.

In Cheshire, the man running a Crewe mini-mart called Top Store said he would sell his shop to one reporter for £18,000 cash.

The shopkeeper, who went by the name Surchi, assured our journalist that “you don’t need anything” to own and run a mini-mart as an asylum seeker.

Surchi told us he was himself a Kurdish asylum seeker who had arrived in the UK in 2022, but whose claim had been refused.

When the BBC later confronted him, he told us he had paperwork proving his right to work. We asked if he could show us these documents, but he hasn’t provided them.

Asylum seekers generally do not have the right to work in the UK while their claim is being processed. Permission to work is only granted in limited circumstances and is subject to strict conditions.

If asylum seekers are granted permission to work, they can only apply for eligible jobs on the Immigration Salary List.

These do not include being a shop manager or shop assistant.

Like our undercover reporters, Surchi told us he was from the semi-autonomous Kurdistan Region of Iraq, an area that straddles the borders of Iraq, Iran, Turkey, and Syria. The region is often referred to as Kurdistan, but it is not an independent country.

To avoid scrutiny by the authorities, Surchi said he paid someone called “Hadi” about £250 a month to be named on official papers.

“That’s his job and he probably has 40 to 50 shops under his name. There’s no problem, he doesn’t mind what you sell,” he explained.

This arrangement let Surchi go under the radar of immigration enforcement and sell whatever he liked. He said he had never paid any council tax and that our undercover reporter would not need to officially register the company.

Immigration enforcement officers had only come by once in the past five years, when he was out, Surchi said during his sales patter. They never returned, he said.

Trading Standards had raided the shop once, Surchi said, and he had been given a £200 fine for selling illegal cigarettes and vapes.

Shop owners in the UK caught selling these items can be fined up to £10,000, but the profits that can be made from such products far outweigh the penalties.

During a tour of the premises, Surchi took us outside to a so-called “stash car” where he said he hid the bulk of his stock until 17:00 each night, when Trading Standards officers finished for the day.

He also told our reporter that “you could make a hiding spot” for the stock in the shop’s basement – where he also showed how he tampered with the electricity meter to avoid paying utility bills.

Surchi sold vapes to a group of teenagers while we were at the shop. “I have customers that are 12 years old, I don’t have any problem with them,” he said.

Customers paid via a card machine into a bank account, he explained. Both of these belonged to his cousin, he said, who owned a mini-mart 15 miles away in Stoke.

On Facebook, we discovered Kurdish builders willing to help us conceal illegal vapes and cigarettes.

One of our reporters posted that he had bought a mini-mart in Manchester and was looking for “a specialist to build a space to hide cigarettes in the shop”.

Six builders got in touch. One sent us a video of what looked like a vending machine for illegal cigarettes hidden in a loft, which, at the press of a button, pinged packets down a chute to a concealed vent below.

It was “fine craftsmanship” and cost £6,000, the builder said, claiming it was guaranteed to fool Trading Standards’ sniffer dogs.

As we delved deeper into who officially owned these mini-marts, a network of ghost directors began to emerge.

One name that kept coming up was Hadi Ahmad Ali – the Birmingham man to whom Surchi told us he was paying his monthly fee. We found Mr Ahmad Ali listed on Companies House as being from Iraq, in his 40s and a director of more than 50 other businesses – mini-marts, barbers and car washes.

One of our reporters phoned him pretending to be an asylum seeker looking to buy the Crewe business to sell illegal cigarettes. Mr Ahmad Ali said the shop didn’t belong to him but the lease was under his name. He confirmed he could keep it in his name for our undercover reporter, for a fee of between £250 and £300 a month.

He also said he could try to provide a bank card for the shop.

“I will give you a 50% guarantee that I can get you a bank card. I have another six to seven shops under my name in Hull and other places.”

Mr Ahmad Ali is still listed as an active director on several businesses on Companies House. We later learned that in October 2024 he had been disqualified from being a company officer for five years.

The ban followed illegal cigarette sales at a shop in his name in Chorley, Lancashire – including to a 16-year-old.

Separately, he pleaded guilty to his involvement in the sale of illegal cigarettes in Lincolnshire and was sentenced to six months in prison, suspended for 18 months.

When later confronted by the BBC, Mr Ahmad Ali told us these mini-marts were nothing to do with him, and he had contacted Companies House to get his name removed from the businesses.

A spokesperson for Companies House said it “now has greater powers to share information and support law enforcement investigations”.

“Where criminality is suspected, information and intelligence are shared with relevant partners.”

Our research linked Mr Ahmad Ali to another man, Ismael Ahmedi Farzanda, who we found was a ghost director and responsible for 25 mini-marts.

Mr Farzanda’s name came up because Companies House filings showed he had taken over as company director from Mr Ahmad Ali at seven mini-mart businesses. The pair also shared a co-directorship on one shop in Blackpool.

One of our reporters managed to call Mr Farzanda, using the same cover story as he had told Mr Ahmad Ali.

“I just put the shops under my name for people,” said Mr Farzanda who, like Mr Ahmad Ali, was based in the West Midlands. He told us an “accountant” would take care of the paperwork, bank accounts and payments to him, and that he would have no problem with us selling illegal cigarettes.

The only request he had was that if the undercover reporter was ever caught by the police, he should let him know immediately.

“If you know you’re caught, tell us so that for the interviews we can change the name and not get in trouble,” he told our reporter.

Mr Farzanda was fined £4,500 in August after one shop, registered in his name in Haslingden, Lancashire, was caught selling illegal vapes to a 14-year-old, according to local media reports.

Seventeen shops registered under the names of Mr Ahmad Ali and Mr Farzanda have been raided since 2021 with illegal tobacco and vapes seized, Trading Standards sources confirmed.

Despite being registered on official documents as being from Iran, Mr Farzanda told our undercover reporter he was actually from the Sharazoor district in neighbouring Iraq.

Both our undercover reporters say they are aware of Kurdish people who have arrived in the UK on small boats and pretended to be Iranian, believing their asylum claims would have a better chance of success.

When later presented with our evidence, Mr Farzanda denied all the allegations put to him by the BBC.

When we looked into the official records attached to all the companies listed for Mr Ahmad Ali and Mr Farzanda, a suspicious pattern emerged.

We found companies would be set up for a year, dissolved, and then set up again – each time with a slightly different spelling of the businesses’ names. The men’s names and birthdays would also be changed slightly.

“Why are they doing that? It’s most likely to evade tax and to dodge scrutiny by authorities,” said financial crime investigator Graham Barrow, when we showed him our data.

We have also confirmed details of two further ghost directors – with 40 companies listed between them.

This UK-wide network of more than 100 company directorships in the names of just four individuals has “all the red flags that I would associate with organised criminal networks”, said Mr Barrow.

The network of businesses identified by the BBC could stretch even wider across the country, said Mr Barrow: “I certainly think it’s hundreds. It could easily be bigger than that,” he said.

We visited more than a dozen mini-marts linked to this network of ghost directors.

Everywhere we went, it was the same story – the shops were on rundown High Streets in some of the UK’s most deprived areas, such as Blackpool, Bradford, Huddersfield and Hull.

All but one of the shops sold counterfeit or smuggled cigarettes for about £4 per pack, instead of the average UK price of £16 for a pack of 20.

As well as Surchi’s story in Crewe, our investigation revealed details of other Kurdish asylum seekers being employed illegally.

A mini-mart worker in a Blackpool shop linked to one of the ghost directors told us he had left an asylum-seeker hotel in Liverpool to work 14-hour days at the shop. “In return I get £60 to £65 [per day],” he told us. “For three months, I worked for £50 [per day].”

He was interviewed by the Home Office four months ago, he said, but hasn’t heard anything since. The shop had been raided by Trading Standards three times, he told us – but he described that as “nothing”.

“Just give them any name and they will walk away,” he explained, saying that whenever he was asked who he was, he would give the name of a famous Kurdish singer, Aziz Waisi.

He did say he was worried by immigration enforcement, however. “They [Trading Standards] take the cigarettes and leave, but immigration makes you do fingerprints.”

We also found another Kurdish shopworker in a Salford shop registered under Ismaeel Farzanda’s name, who said he was in limbo. “I’ve been here for six months and I still haven’t claimed asylum,” he said.

The 42-year-old said he had first come to the UK as a teenager, before returning to Kurdistan.

He said he returned to the UK this year and “they found my previous fingerprint records but nothing came of it”. He said he was staying with friends.

“Honestly, we’re all struggling here and don’t know what to do.”

The government says it has increased raids by 51% and this year raised the fines for businesses to £60,000 per person found working illegally.

Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood added that the government has “seized millions of pounds worth of unlicensed goods, banned dodgy directors and removed more than 35,000 people with no right to be in the UK.”

Additional reporting by Phill Edwards and Kirstie Brewer