Johnathan Otter Self styles himself as an author, journalist and promoter of humanitarian causes. He is perhaps best known through his more successful and famous brother, Will. Quietly, Jonathan has also enjoyed a prolific business career over the span of the last 30 years; in marketing, publishing – and more recently, ethical dog food and diamonds.
Johnathan is a member of numerous charitable organisations, promoter of progressive business practices and champion of environmentally sound business. Yet these supposedly progressive and ethical businesses follow a complex chain of ownership through numerous offshore jurisdictions.
Self’s ethical pet food business – which trades as Honey’s – is a UK-based company called The Darling Experiment Limited, which has passed through a number of foreign ownerships over the last decade, all of which are recognised as offshore tax havens.
In 2018, Panamanian company Darling’s Real Food International S.A. transferred shares in the UK Darling Experiment to Three Things Holdings in Gibraltar, which itself is a majority shareholder in Maltese company Three Things Limited. Self is the owner, founder or UBO for all of them.
And whilst such behaviour is not uncommon, those who take such approaches tend to stay silent and as far away from the spotlight as possible. Not Self – who not only continues to enjoy an amenable reception from the media, but also slates those who behave in the same manner as him.
Its not so much the behaviour, as the hypocrisy of the Self that is outrageous.
Background
The elder brother of Will Self began his career as an advertising copywriter in the [late 70s?], before founding Self Direct, a direct-marketing agency. He sold the business in 1993, and subsequently worked on several initiatives ranging from consultancy to technology, with several companies funded by his profits after selling Self Direct.
Following in the footsteps of his brother, Jonathan embarked on a literary career in the early 2000s, publishing his autobiography, titled Self Abuse, in 2001. The Guardian summarised the book by stating that “The brother of the more famous Will ODs in therapy and splurges the results over 247 pages”.
His subsequent attempts at literature were less artistic: in 2007, Self published a money-making guide for teenagers, a book on natural feeding for dogs (“Honey’s Natural Feeding Handbook for Dogs”) in 2012, a ‘guide’ to the world’s emerald trade in 2013 (titled ‘Emerald’);and Good Money – a guide on how to become an ethical entrepreneur – in 2017. He has also remained a regular contributor to publications including Country Life, The Telegraph, and The Times.
Current Business
Following a roughly decade-long hiatus, Self returned to his entrepreneurial roots in 2009, founding Honey’s, a dog food producer focusing on “free range, certified organic and wild meat”. The company has subsequently achieved substantial success, growing to have over £1 million in current assets, as per their last financial report.
The company makes a multitude of claims regarding its apparently progressive business practices – including an emphasis on farm animal welfare, using only British ingredients, providing 1% of profit from sales to charity, and engaging customers about their needs on a personal level, whilst refusing to use advertisement and promotion (despite multiple videos of Self on social media promoting Honey’s products).
And despite the company’s continued profitability and growth, Honey’s website suggests that they are “not a business” and “pretty uncommercial”. Jonathan notes that he set up an employee trust in 2019, to make the business more of a “partnership arrangement”.
The strong ethical focus that seems to emanate throughout Honey’s can also be seen in his other entrepreneurial endeavour – the ‘revival’ of famed London Diamond Bourse company Streeter & Co. Streeter was founded in 1868, and closed around the start of the 20th Century. Self founded a business under the name in 2021, with a proposed interest of focusing on “ethically sourced gemstones and jewellery”.
Beyond using the name, there is no clear connection between the original Streeter & Co., and the one founded by Self – nor is there any evidence of any production by Self’s new outfit.
Much as with Honey’s and “responsible dog food”, Self began to soliloquise about the benefits of “ethical gem production” almost immediately after reviving Streeter & Co. In an April 2021 newsletter released by the London Diamond Bourse, which announced that Self was joining the group as a member, also included a commentary piece by him, on the titled “Are synthetic diamonds ethical?”.
Self’s moral high-roading transcends his businesses practices, into his publications and online commentary. He attacks various businesses and institutions for only “thinking in terms of profit and regulation”(regarding Musgrave); and attacking ‘Big Pharma’ on their “medical philosophy”, stating that it “gets up their (greedy) noses” – counterbalancing his comments with anecdotes about the ethical nature of his own businesses.
Though, it would appear that tax avoidance (and possibly evasion), and the use of shady offshore trusts, does pass Self’s litmus tests for ethics and greed.
Tax avoidance and offshores
Whilst Self enjoys waxing lyrical about the ethics of his businesses (whilst simultaneously shaming others who don’t follow his approach), he fails to mention the creative accounting that employed behind-the-scenes at Honey’s, and some of his older businesses.
Dating back to the 90s, Self was an active and prolific user of Panama trusts to open up his companies, including ones founded following the sale of Self Direct in 1991. Due to opaque nature of these jurisdictions, we do not have information about the exact nature of these trusts, but we do know that money flowed in from British and Irish accounts.
Local sources state that following the publication of the Panama Papers, Self was “genuinely frightened and would not listen to reason”, fearing not only the state of his assets, but also the potential damage to his reputation. He subsequently moved his holdings to offshores closer to home – namely Gibraltar and Malta, placed in a company named Three Things Holdings.
To help with the process, Self appears to have instructed Clive Caruana, an experienced Maltese accountant who had previously worked with Grant Thorton, before opening his own practice, CCPS Malta, in 2009. Sources have described Caruana – who has previously held directorship positions in a number of companies associated with Self (including Streeter & Co.) – as a “professional who knows how to master the subject matter”, and a ‘front man’ “get[s] their clients out of trouble, to charge as little tax as possible”.
And whilst there are legitimate reasons to start up trusts in either Panama or Malta, those are few and far in between; especially for businesses based and built exclusively in the UK. As such, there is reasonable ground to believe that Self was using these trusts (and fearfully moving them from a perceived spotlight), in order to avoid significant tax liabilities in the UK and Ireland. And whilst this is a strategy employed by countless other wealthy individuals, few enjoy quite the ethically sound and caring reputations that Self tries to build around himself.
It is said thathypocrisy is the audacity to preach integrity from a den of corruption, and Self’s case demonstrates that proverb perfectly.
