Who owns Nando's? Following the chain to a named person

Ask who owns Nando's and you will get a confident answer from the press. Ask the UK register, and you get something more precise and more interesting: four companies, one named individual, and a gap between control and ownership that most people never notice.

This walk uses only what Companies House publishes. Every company number is here so you can repeat it. Checked 24 September 2026.

The chain

Nando's Chickenland Limited (02580031) is the company that runs the UK restaurants, incorporated on 5 February 1991. It has one person with significant control, and that person is a company.

Step	Company	Number	What the register records
1	Nando's Chickenland Limited	02580031	controlled by Nando's Finance Limited
2	Nando's Finance Limited	05415274	controlled by Nando's Group Limited
3	Nando's Group Limited	06530077	controlled by Nando's Group Holdings Limited
4	Nando's Group Holdings Limited	06451677	controlled by Mr Leslie Perlman

At each of the first three steps the register records the same three kinds of control: ownership of 75% to 100% of shares, 75% to 100% of voting rights, and the right to appoint and remove directors. Three companies, one straight line, no branching.

Then, at the top, it changes.

The detail almost everyone misses

Mr Leslie Perlman is recorded against Nando's Group Holdings Limited with voting rights of 75% to 100% and the right to appoint and remove directors. He is not recorded as owning 75% to 100% of the shares. The share-ownership nature that appears at every corporate step below is simply absent at the human step.

That is not an error, and it is not a loophole. The PSC register records significant control, and control has several flavours. A person can hold the votes and the power to appoint the board without personally holding the shares, typically because the shares sit with a nominee, a trust, or another structure. The register states the control. It does not state who holds the economic interest behind it.

Anyone reading "75% to 100% of voting rights" as "owns 75% to 100% of Nando's" has quietly added a fact the register does not contain.

Two more things the register remembers

Percentages are bands, not numbers. The register never says 82%. It says 75% to 100%, one of three fixed bands. Any tool showing you a precise ownership percentage from PSC data has invented the precision. We show the band.

The register keeps its own history. Nando's Group Holdings Limited filed a statement on 12 December 2016 saying it had not yet completed the steps to identify its PSC, and withdrew it on 22 December 2017. Perlman's own PSC entry is dated 6 April 2016, earlier than the statement. That kind of overlap is common, it is public, and it is invisible unless you read the statements as well as the entries.

What we are not telling you

The press reports a family behind Nando's. The register does not say that anywhere in this chain, so neither do we. What sits behind the votes, and who benefits from the shares, is not a fact Companies House publishes, and an article that blurs "the register says" into "everyone knows" is exactly the sort of thing you should not build a compliance decision on.

Where the register stops, we stop.

Why this is hard by hand, and easy by API

Done manually this is four company lookups, four PSC lookups, and the discipline to notice that the natures of control change at the last hop. It takes a careful person perhaps twenty minutes, and the result is stale the next time anything is filed.

Registrum's PSC chain endpoint does the traversal in one call:

GET /v1/company/02580031/psc/chain

It follows corporate PSCs until it reaches individuals, returns each hop with its natures of control, and tells you when a branch could not be resolved rather than quietly stopping. This chain resolves fully, four levels deep, with nothing unresolved. The capability has been in production since 13 March 2026.

Verifying this yourself

Every hop above is on the public register, free, no account needed:

• find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/02580031/persons-with-significant-control
• ...and the same path for 05415274, 06530077 and 06451677.
• The withdrawn 2016 statement is under the same PSC section on 06451677.

Or check ours against theirs: https://registrum.co.uk/company/02580031. If the two ever disagree, the register is right and we want to know.