MG Motor UK Ltd sells cars in Britain under a badge that has been British since 1924.
Britain is the easy case for an ownership question. Companies House publishes full statutory accounts, free. It runs a separate register of people with significant control, built specifically to expose beneficial ownership. It runs a third for overseas entities, which legally compels disclosure.
Three public registers, no paywall, same corporate group. They give three different answers.
Three hops up, named in note 21. The document is a scan with no text layer.
Every entry since 2016 is an individual. The group is never named.
Filed against a group affiliate. Legal form recorded as Government.
Via SAIC Group, 63.27% as at 31 December 2024. Published in English, by the company, on its own website.
MG Motor UK has no LEI. Its parent has one, in Chinese, and it lapsed in 2023.
What the accounts say
MG Motor UK Ltd is company 05779958. Note 21 of its 2024 accounts:
The immediate parent undertaking is SAIC Motor International UK Ltd (formerly Nanjing Automobile Corporation (UK) Limited)… The ultimate parent undertaking and controlling party is SAIC Motor Corporation Limited, incorporated in China.
That names two of three hops. The middle one is in the intermediate company’s accounts, whose own note 21 gives its parent as SAIC Motor International Ltd, in China.
So the answer is three hops, and it takes two filings to see it. Read MG Motor UK’s accounts alone and you get a chain with a hole in it.
Almost everything here has been renamed
| Company | Was | Until |
|---|---|---|
| MG Motor UK Ltd | NAC MG UK Limited | Jan 2009 |
| SAIC Motor International UK Ltd | Nanjing Automobile Corporation (UK) Ltd | Sep 2022 |
| SAIC Motor UK Technical Centre Ltd | Ricardo (2010) Limited | May 2007 |
Anything indexed before those dates holds the old string. Note the third one: nothing about “Ricardo” suggests a Chinese automaker.
The document is a photograph
Both sets of accounts are scanned images with no text layer. Extract text normally and you get 21 bytes, which looks exactly like a filing that fails to support the claim. You have to rasterise the pages and run OCR.
The answer to “who owns MG” is a picture of some words.
What the ownership register says
Companies House also maintains MG Motor UK’s register of people with significant control. This is the register built to answer beneficial ownership questions.
It names no company. Every entry since 2016 is an individual, each recorded as having significant influence or control. No corporate parent. No percentage. SAIC is never mentioned.
That is not a filing failure. Group accounts and control registers ask different questions, and a company can answer both correctly and produce two records that do not resemble each other. But if you pulled beneficial ownership from the register designed for beneficial ownership, you would not learn this company is Chinese owned.
One company, three names, three addresses
The group’s holding company does name a corporate controller, and the details are worth putting side by side with the accounts.
| The ultimate parent, as filed | Where |
|---|---|
| SAIC Motor Corporation Limited | MG Motor UK, note 21 |
| SAIC Motor | Holding company accounts, prose |
| Saic Motor Co. Ltd | Control register |
| Its address, as filed | Where |
|---|---|
| 489 Weihai Road, Jing’an District | Holding company accounts |
| 563 Songtao Road, Zhangjiang High-Tech Park, Pudong | MG Motor UK, note 21 |
| Room 509, Building 1, 563 Song Tao Road, Pilot Free Trade Zone | Control register |
One registry. One company. The street is spelled two ways and sits in two districts.
There is also a dissolved SAIC Motor Ltd registered to a farm in Devon, with no connection to any of this. A name match finds it.
What the overseas register says
The third register reaches the top. SAIC Motor HK Investment Limited is registered as an overseas entity, which obliges it to identify its beneficial owners. Its current filing records exactly one:
Government Of Shanghai. Legal form: Government. Nature of control: ownership of shares over 25%, ownership of voting rights over 25%, right to appoint or remove directors.
So the state is at the top, and a British register says so in English.
Be precise about what that is. It is a declaration by an affiliate, not a line in MG Motor UK’s chain. MG Motor UK’s accounts stop at SAIC Motor Corporation Limited and never mention a government.
What the company says about itself
The document that actually closes the gap is not a register.
SAIC Motor is listed in Shanghai and publishes an English annual report on its own website:
As at 31 December 2024… SAIC (Group) held 7,324,009,279 shares, accounting for 63.27% of the total shares.
And in the notes: “The Company’s parent company is SAIC (Group), which is a state owned enterprise supervised by Shanghai SASAC.”
The whole chain, stated by the company, in English, for free. It was never hidden. It lives in a 244 page PDF that no ownership database indexes, on a corporate website, in a different country from the company you started with.
The percentage moved without a transaction
The previous year’s report shows the same shareholder holding the same 7,324,009,279 shares, at 62.69%.
Nobody bought or sold anything. The company repurchased stock, the denominator shrank, and the number rose by more than half a point on its own.
A stored ownership percentage decays silently. The only defence is a date.
What the global identifier system says
There is a system built for exactly this. GLEIF issues Legal Entity Identifiers and publishes data whose stated purpose is answering who owns whom. It is free, bulk downloadable, and the only open global ownership dataset there is.
We counted all of it. In the golden copy published on 20 August 2026:
- 3,407,180 entities hold an LEI.
- 89,700 report a parent. That is 2.63%.
- 3,157,553 filed a formal exception saying there is nothing to report.
Almost none of that means “no owner”
Read the exception reasons in GLEIF’s own words:
- 1,163,365 NATURAL_PERSONS: controlled by natural persons with no qualifying legal entity between.
- 1,096,550 NON_CONSOLIDATING: controlled by legal entities not required to prepare consolidated accounts.
- 663,383 NO_KNOWN_PERSON: no known controller, such as diversified shareholding.
- 123,523 NO_LEI: the parent will not consent to having an identifier.
- 108,750 NON_PUBLIC, plus 1,982 under codes GLEIF has since deprecated.
Most of those describe a company that is controlled, by something the accounting definition does not capture. The register works as designed. The design answers a narrower question than the one people bring to it.
The chains that exist are one hop deep
Of the 89,700 entities reporting a parent, 78.1% sit exactly one hop below the top. Sixteen percent go two. The deepest declared anywhere is nine. A further 36,674 relationships hang off registrations that lapsed and were never renewed.
MG is not in it, and its parent cannot be found
MG Motor UK has no LEI. Neither does either intermediate.
The ultimate parent does, and this is the part worth sitting with. Search for “SAIC Motor Corporation” and you get nothing. Search “MG Motor UK” and you get a Spanish dealership and an Indian joint venture.
The company is in there under 上海汽车集团股份有限公司, with no English name and no transliteration on the record. Its registered address is how you confirm it is the same company the British control register points at.
That record lapsed in December 2023. It declares one subsidiary, a finance arm. It reports no parent of its own.
What it takes to answer this
The data was not missing. A government published nearly all of it, free. The problem is that ownership is not a field, and every source here is a different field.
Four things have to be true of anything that gets this right.
- Read documents, not records. The only complete chain was in prose, in the notes to two sets of accounts, one of them a photograph.
- Carry name history with dates. Four companies here have been renamed, and the parent appears under three spellings plus a Chinese-only legal name.
- Date every edge. A lapsed identifier and a current filing disagree, and only timestamps say which to trust. So does 62.69% against 63.27%.
- Say where the documents stop. The filings support a three hop chain. A separate register names a government. Those are different statements.
Our entity hierarchy API works that way. It resolves the input to a verified legal entity first, because you cannot walk a graph from a node you have not identified, then researches the structure around that anchor. Every edge keeps the document it came from.
Which means the honest output is not a parent string. It is a chain, where each hop carries its source and the date that source was true.
Ready to try it? Start with free API keys or explore the entity hierarchy API.