Barbara Kahan may be the busiest woman in Britain. She is 85 years old, retired and in ill health. Despite this, the former consultant is listed as the founding director of 25,802 companies. That is quite a feat — equivalent to starting a company every day since April 22, 1946, when Barbara was all of 14.
It’s not that Kahan was an ultra-ambitious teenage entrepreneur. Rather, she was until quite recently a director of A1 Company Services, a specialist in company formation. Businesses of every stripe — from rubbish clearers to online pornographers, financial scammers to perfectly legitimate retailers and restaurateurs — list their addresses as A1’s modest two-storey building on a residential street behind a Homebase store in north London.
It is one of