Who owns sealand

The Government is not responsible for external links and Forum activity. Sign In. Principality of Sealand. About Sealand. Visit Sealand Store. I do, the crane swings around, and I'm momentarily suspended a few feet over the deck.

I jump down and come face-to-face with a menacing sight: Sealand's 3. It's covered with rust and will never fire again, but it seems like an apt symbol of the micronation's defiant future. Not to mention its certifiably defiant past: Sealand wouldn't be what it is today without the hotspur energies of Roy Bates, who rose to the rank of major in the British army, fought in North Africa, Sicily, and Italy, and was wounded in action several times.

After the war, he started various enterprises, including an import-export business, a wholesale meat business, and a boat fishing fleet. In , the Bates family embarked on a project that Joan cheerfully describes as "pioneering commercial radio. Inspired in part by the success of another radio pirate, and ignoring the law, Roy set up a station on Fort Knock John, one of the abandoned WWII sea forts where he started broadcasting music and advertisements.

Called Radio Essex, the station's 5-kilowatt broadcast blanketed roughly a quarter of England. But the British government wasn't a fan: Bates received a summons in September for operating a transmitter without a license.

Unfortunately for him, he had picked a tower that was just inside England's territorial limit, which was then set at 3 miles out from the coast. Roy wouldn't make the same mistake again. On Christmas Eve that year, he and Michael, 15 at the time and home from boarding school, dismantled their station and hauled everything to Roughs Tower, which was 6 miles out and therefore beyond the existing territorial limit.

There wasn't much the British government could do to stop them, but the military did blow up another fort that stood beyond the 3-mile boundary, to prevent a similar takeover there. A few months later, Roy and Joan were out with friends in a local pub. Joan mentioned casually that she wanted to have "a flag and some palm trees" to go with the "island" her husband had won for her.

Their friends started listing all the things Roy and Joan could do with a sovereign property. Roy hired an attorney to do further research, and learned that a loophole in international law left room for the Bates family to claim Roughs Tower as its own. On September 2, , Roy proclaimed the independence of Sealand.

He pegged the country's currency to the US dollar, minted gold and silver coins, issued passports, and printed a series of stamps honoring great discoverers like Christopher Columbus and Sir Walter Raleigh. Britain basically ignored the "country" until , when, in a move that helped force the sovereignty issue, Michael fired warning shots at workmen who were servicing a navigational buoy near the platform.

The next time Michael and Roy set foot on British soil, they were promptly arrested for weapons violations. But in October of that year, a British court acquitted them, ruling that since Sealand was "about 3 miles outside territorial waters," the Crown's firearms laws didn't apply there.

The authorities, perhaps sensing that an embarrassing precedent was taking shape, decided not to appeal. The British government extended its territorial limit to 12 miles in , but Sealand has been allowed to plod on. Over the years, other legal cases have seemed to bolster the Bateses' sovereignty claim, though the government's stance is still nonrecognition.

In , the British Department of Health and Social Security issued a written ruling that Michael Bates did not have to pay his national health insurance for the periods he resided on Sealand. In , Sealand once again fired shots at a boat that came too close. Local authorities investigated, but the matter was quickly dropped. Sealand itself was never used for pirate broadcasting, due to changes in English law and a broadcasting environment that caused Roy to lose interest in pirate radio by the late '60s.

Roy looked around for outside investment in the '70s and '80s, but little came of it except misadventure. Michael says that a number of "undesirables" have contacted the family over the years hoping to use the place for various schemes - from setting up some sort of "pleasure island" to smuggling.

Roy claimed he was approached during the Falklands War by a group of Argentineans who wanted to buy Sealand and set up camp "right on Britain's doorstep. The most raucous moment in Sealand's history occurred in , when the Sealanders were approached by a German and Dutch consortium of shadowy lawyers and diamond merchants.

Roy was wary, but Joan persuaded him, saying, "What have we got to lose? When Roy and Joan arrived in Austria, five men greeted them and arranged a meeting for later.

The men never showed. Suspicious, Roy and Joan tried to contact Sealand. We phoned different people who worked in the area - fishermen and the Coast Guard. One of them said, 'I saw a big helicopter hovering over Sealand.

It wasn't. Michael was at Sealand when the helicopter showed up. As he remembers it, the mystery party lowered a man who claimed to have a telex from Roy confirming that a deal had been made.

Michael didn't buy that. Then the helicopter lowered a man who whimpered that "he was sick and needed a glass of whiskey. Once on the deck, the men locked Michael up without food or water for three days. He says his attackers finally put him on a Dutch fishing boat that they "controlled," took him to Holland, and left him there without a passport or money.

Michael made his way back to Southend, where he met up with Roy and Joan. They hired a helicopter and a dashing pilot who'd worked on a few James Bond flicks , assembled some men, and set out to recapture their country. When they arrived, Michael, shotgun in hand, slid down a rope and fired a shot - apparently by accident - and the intruders surrendered.

Swashbuckling stuff. But as the Bates admit, life on Sealand hasn't always been a thrill, and in recent years the tiny country has been sliding into obscurity. Michael lives in Southend, where he runs his business. Roy spent most of the '90s living on Sealand by himself, ready to defend its sovereignty with rifle and shotgun. Joan, afflicted with arthritis, retired to Southend, keeping in touch with Roy by cell phone.

All these changes have made Sealand more than a little depressing: a geriatric experiment in nation-building, doomed to die a slow death, beaten into the sea by wind and waves. John Brunner's novel, The Shockwave Rider, features a communications haven that is invulnerable to the US government. More recently, Neal Stephenson's novel, Cryptonomicon, is the story of a fictional data haven on a Pacific atoll, unbreakable codes, and a brilliant protagonist coincidentally named Avi.

HavenCo's founders say their inspiration didn't come from a novel, but from a chance meeting at a financial cryptography conference held in Sean Hastings dropped out of the mathematics undergraduate program at the University of Michigan in with one semester to go because he didn't care to meet his humanities requirements.

He spent eight years kicking around New York and San Francisco, where he played poker and did some programming. By , he and Jo were living in New Orleans, where he wrote order-entry and automated voice-response software for legal sports-betting operations, while Jo did market studies for riverboat and tribal casinos all over the US.

One day they got a call from a group of gamblers Sean knew in New York. The gamblers said they wanted to set up their own touch-tone sports-betting system - but this one would be offshore. Sean and Jo decided that the combination of cheap telephone rates, high tech infrastructure, and easy regulations made Costa Rica an ideal spot.

In the end, Cousin Bob screwed things up by insisting that the operation be headquartered at his favorite resort, which had lousy telephone connections. Eventually the project fell apart. The Hastingses had already put their stuff in storage, rented out their New Orleans home, and bought plane tickets, so they decided to go to the Caribbean anyway.

They contacted Vince Cate and Bob Green, two expatriates and high tech entrepreneurs on Anguilla, a hot spot for foreign businesses eager to take advantage of the country's tax haven status.

See " Plotting Away in Margaritaville ," Wired 5. Cate, who eventually bought out Sean's share of the company and remains on amiable terms, adds that while the HavenCo idea sounds risky, he thinks Sean and Lackey might be able to pull it off.

Anguilla turned out to be a lousy location for running offshore data services. The government prohibits gambling and pornography - even on Internet servers.

Mr Bates died earlier this year, aged He said: "One of our avid supporters said he'd been speaking to Ed and telling him the story of Sealand and he found the whole thing fascinating and asked if he would be able to get a title, so we've conferred the title of baron on him. Sheeran used his Twitter account to welcome the news. He said: "A friend of a friend owns an oil rig that got made into a country legally, and called Sealand, which made him king of Sealand, which means he can give out titles to people.

What's it like to live on Sealand? Years later, declassified British records and other documents that came to light after the release of the Panama Papers in made it clear that the puppeteer who had orchestrated the putsch was likely a German diamond dealer named Alexander Gottfried Achenbach, who had approached the Bates family in the early s with the idea of greatly expanding the principality.

His plan involved building a casino, a square lined with trees, a duty-free shop, a bank, a post office, a hotel, a restaurant, and apartments, all of which would be adjacent but attached to the Sealand platform. He filed a petition to renounce his German citizenship, demanding he instead be recognized as a citizen of Sealand. Local authorities in Aachen, Germany, where he made the petition, refused his request.

In his effort to win Sealand official recognition, Achenbach sent the constitution to countries, as well as to the United Nations, with the request that it be ratified. But foreign leaders remained skeptical.

Achenbach grew increasingly impatient about his stalled plans for Sealand, and he blamed the Bates family for a lack of commitment.

He soon hatched an idea for speeding things along. The men held Michael hostage for several days before putting him on a fishing boat headed to the Netherlands, where he was released to his parents. Roy was furious about the coup and decided to take back his micronation by force.

After returning to England, he enlisted John Crewdson, a friend and helicopter pilot who had worked on some of the early James Bond movies, to fly an armed team, including Roy and Michael, to the platform. They arrived just before dawn, approaching from downwind to lessen the noise from their rotors. Sliding down a rope from the helicopter, Michael hit the deck hard, jarring and firing the shotgun strapped to his chest, nearly hitting his father.

Startled that the intruders were already opening fire, the German guard on deck immediately surrendered. I asked Michael Bates about this allegation. Michael also dismissed my suggestion that the coup was karmic. Sealand was born not of thievery but of conquest, he rebutted, which felt to me like a distinction without a difference.

But the Bates family remain the unofficial historians of Sealand; years of practice have honed their ability to tell a good tale about it. Michael told me that he had thought Sealand was done with coups after the Achenbach attempt. But in , the FBI called. The bureau wanted to talk about the murder of the fashion designer Gianni Versace on the front steps of his Miami home. But during the investigation, the owner of the boat, a man named Torsten Reineck, had presented forged Sealand passports to authorities.

Investigators traced the passports and the website to Spain, where they found evidence that Achenbach had waited patiently to stage another coup, though this time from afar. Still stranger turns were yet to come. The police then raided three Sealand offices in Madrid and a shop that made Sealand license plates.

These passports had reportedly appeared all over the globe, from eastern Europe to Africa. Nearly 4, were sold in Hong Kong when many residents scrambled to obtain foreign documents before Britain handed the colony over to China in Among the people whom Spanish police tied to the passports were Moroccan hashish smugglers and Russian arms dealers. The Los Angeles Times reported that about 80 people were accused of committing fraud, falsifying documents, and pretending to be foreign dignitaries.

I asked Michael whether he thought these transactions were part of a larger scheme to take over Sealand. Maybe so, he said. The negotiations for these attempted arms deals were orchestrated by a business called Sealand Trade Development Authority Limited. Recently the Panama Papers included evidence that this company, set up by the Panama City law firm Mossack Fonseca, was tied to a vast global network of money launderers and other criminals.

Though most of what Michael told me corresponded to what I already knew from my research, hearing it directly from the source made the stories seem more credible. I needed some air and asked Michael whether he could give me a tour. We headed out of the kitchen and down the hall and squeezed down a steep spiral staircase. Each room was 22 feet in diameter. Made of concrete, they were cold and clammy and smelled of diesel and mold.

Like inverse lighthouses that extended beneath the waves rather than above, most of the floors were under the waterline, which filled them with a faint gurgling sound. The north tower housed guest rooms, a brig, and a conference room, which was where Barrington stayed. As we descended, he paused at a room that had been outfitted as a minimalist ecumenical chapel. An open Bible sat on a table decorated with an ornate cloth. A Koran sat on a shelf alongside works of Socrates and Shakespeare.

It was a surreal and claustrophobic nook, like a library on a submarine. We exited the top of the north tower and crossed the platform to the south tower.