Word.ws English Dictionary

shell company

shell company noun: a company that engages in no substantive business activities, but instead exists as a vehicle for legal or financial transactions, typically to shield another party from liability or other issues.

Noun

shell company (plural shell companies)

  1. A company that engages in no substantive business activities, but instead exists as a vehicle for legal or financial transactions, typically to shield another party from liability or other issues.
    • It was a shell company and, the SEC alleges, never had researchers, research plans or any scientific resources.2003 November 15, Tony Levene, “Capital letters”, in The Guardian
    • This luxury-loving and profligate shell company is registered at a betting shop on the Caledonian Road, an unlovely thoroughfare in North London on which you'd be more likely to find amphetamines than a top-notch lawyer.2018, Oliver Bullough, chapter 2, in Moneyland, Profile Books, →ISBN, page 19

shell company meaning in Indonesian

shell company in Indonesian

company without activity created for tax purposes
perusahaan cangkang

Synonyms of shell company

Forms of shell company

pluralshell companies

Questions about shell company

What does shell company mean?
Shell company means a company that engages in no substantive business activities, but instead exists as a vehicle for legal or financial transactions, typically to shield another party from liability or other issues.
What is shell company in Indonesian?
Shell company in Indonesian is perusahaan cangkang. See Shell company meaning in Indonesian.
What part of speech is shell company?
Shell company is a noun.
What is the plural of shell company?
The plural of shell company is shell companies.

Words near shell company in the dictionary

  1. shell beans
  2. shell bed
  3. shell casing
  4. shell casings
  5. shell companies
  6. shell company
  7. shell corporation
  8. shell corporations
  9. shell game
  10. shell games
  11. shell ginger

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: shell company (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Cite this entry: “shell company.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/shell_company. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.