How is it then that they are granted *more* money (aka make more debt) to buy another company (or 25% of shares in this case)

I forget the exact details, but when I worked at the car supermarket, the company accountant explained it to me. The “umbrella company” at the time (owned by two individual directors)  was making lots of money. The turnover was in the region of £140m and I think profits for each were around £5m. To get their money out of this company was subject to corporation tax (on profits). So one of the directors bought a failing car sales site, that was making losses of around £10m. This allowed him to “lend” money (from the profitable site) to the failing site. He could then take (his own) money out of the “failing site” tax free (since the company wasn’t profitable, it wasn’t subject to corporation tax) as a “loan repayment”. So instead of paying tax by withdrawing his £5m a year profits from the profitable site, he “loaned it” to the failing site, and could withdraw his £10m “rescue fund” tax free.

I may have the exact details wrong (I really should have paid more attention, but you know what company accountants are like! *snooze*). But that’s the basic gist of it.

Couple that with recent UK tax laws that – in an effort to turn us into a “manufacturing powerhouse” thanks to a non-specific political event in 2016 that we don’t talk about – give tax breaks of x10 for anyone registering a patent for “new IP”, and you can see how a cash-rich company (e.g. an asset management company) is quite happy to sink £1.25m into a failing business; all they need is one patent to be granted (I think even a patent *application* was good enough at one point) and they could get to withdraw £12.5m tax-free at a stroke (this is on top of the usual feed-money-from-a-profitable-company-into-a-failing-one trickery that accountants get up to, and it’s not difficult to see why it happens).